The early days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe were full of family-friendly adventures. Captain America: The Winter Soldier was the most grounded of the bunch back then in that people could easily die in a fight, and it meant something to see Nick Fury and Black Widow visibly struggle with getting shot. A year later, Marvel and Netflix’s Daredevil made such violence its entire core, which helped change the trajectory of Marvel and the larger live-action superhero media complex.
By the time Daredevil premiered in 2015, it’d been over a decade since the Ben Affleck movie became a punching bag as one of many bad superhero movies of the early 2000s. (Aside from its use of Evanescence’s iconic “Bring Me to Life,” of course.) But the movie hardly seemed to matter when the show had pretty good trailers and its opening minutes effectively set up Matt Murdock’s origin and his religious dilemma, and showed he’s really good at beating Hell’s Kitchen’s criminals to a pulp.
And if that didn’t win over audiences, its one-shot hallway fight in the second episode sure did it. Throughout that first season, it made a case for itself as a Marvel show for adults—or at least, those who like crime stories and thought they could use more blind acrobats or ninjas.
As the first of what was eventually a six-series venture between Marvel and Netflix, including Daredevil spin-off The Punisher, Daredevil offered a promising start for the companies’ collaboration. On its own merits, the show generally made good on that potential across its three-season run, and succeeded in bringing Matt’s street-level antics to TV.
More than anything, its biggest onscreen failing would come in its portrayal of Asian characters, and by extension, the hero’s clash with the secret ninja society the Hand. For a show that went to great lengths to provide texture to villains like Kingpin, Bullseye, and even the Russian villains of that first season, it’s a great misstep the show couldn’t afford that to the supernatural side of Matt’s heroic life and his foes that fell within that sphere.
Nowadays, Daredevil and its sibling series—Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Punisher, and The Defenders—feel like a lifetime ago. While each show had its own individual strengths and weaknesses, collectively, they could arguably be considered mature almost experimental storytelling the MCU was in need of at the time. By Marvel’s Phase Two, the films had fallen into a formula, and that’s largely persisted despite the studio bringing in new directors and marketing those films as something different.
The firehose of MCU media was one of the Netflix shows’ biggest enemies: by the time this partnership ended, the entire Defenders enterprise was practically lagging behind the MCU’s embrace of weirder, more out-there concepts. Some shows seemed ready to take some swings of their own before they were canceled, so it’s ultimately unclear how above and beyond they would’ve ultimately gone had they just been given another season to find out.
What’s less uncertain is that Daredevil helped begin the wave of adult-oriented superhero fare that’s led to Deadpool and The Boys. Whereas those two projects often treat their violence as the punchline to a joke or some delightful slapstick, Daredevil took its beatdowns quite seriously—big shocker, right?—whether it was a simple bullet to the head or Fisk decapitating a man with a car door. For whatever reason, this was an easier sell to audiences than DC pushing a cinematic Batman who branded his enemies or a Superman floating in the rain with menacing red eyes.
Matt is, first and foremost, a street-level hero who usually doesn’t get caught up bigger nonsense unless he absolutely needs to. It provides some relative rules for the type of stories he can get involved in, something Stephen S. DeKnight and later showrunners understood by keeping stories contained to Hell’s Kitchen and Kingpin or Matt’s internal struggle with his brand of Catholic guilt-fueled justice. And if any of that ever felt like it ran its course, that’s where most of the other Defenders shows came in, often with explorations of their own weighty subject matter, like sexual assault in Jessica or racial injustice and Black family dynamics in Luke Cage.
Daredevil was born in the darkness and molded a whole subgenre around it. The OG show’s grit and grime made it delightful to see Matt spit up blood or Fisk reminisce about when he was a boy, and it’s embedded into the show’s DNA. From guest appearances in She-Hulk and Hawkeye, we can see Matt and Fisk would’ve fit into the lighter MCU well enough, but Born Again’s first iteration would’ve strayed too far from its roots. Unlike the Fantastic Four or X-Men, audiences didn’t want Daredevil to get a reboot, they just wanted him and his circle to be in the MCU while otherwise operating as usual. Showrunner Dario Scardapane and stars Charlie Cox, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Jon Bernthal have said in interviews the rework was to everyone’s benefit in part because it allowed them to make a continuation of the original show that’s part of Marvel’s interconnected world. Cox reprised his role in the animated Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man earlier this year, but in live-action, nothing’s come of these MCU connections just yet.
It’s too bad Born Again had a troubled development; in its best moments, it has the makings of a worthy successor. With luck, the 2026-bound season two will show what Scardapane and his creative team are capable of when given full reign over the character. Even if Born Again doesn’t hit the same heights as its predecessor, it’s more Daredevil, and that may ultimately be enough.
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