Streaming Marvel: Daredevil’s Lovable Cast Made Themselves Indispensable

The Marvel Cinematic Universe rolls ever onward, whether the average viewer can possibly watch all of it or not. And now, the small screen has become the place to watch the bulk of MCU storytelling. Can’t keep it all straight? Ken Lowe is revisiting every MCU TV show—the good, the bad and the non-canon—in our ongoing feature, Streaming Marvel. First up: the hero of Hell’s Kitchen, the Man Without Fear, Ol’ Hornhead himself—Daredevil.

Like its current owner Disney, the story of Marvel is the story of copyright and intellectual property law. It is so intrusive an element, so responsible for which Marvel properties are now popular and which are sidelined, that it feels impossible to just sit down and watch any of the hundreds of hours of movies or TV shows without some knowledge of what the board rooms and shareholders have decided you are allowed to watch.

Consider the 2006 videogame Marvel Ultimate Alliance, a beat-em-up game with the feeling of an overturned toybox. If you wanted to build a team with Spider-Man, Captain America, Wolverine, and The Thing from the Fantastic Four, this game pats you on the back and tells you to have fun.

To achieve the same feat in film between the late ‘90s and 2019, however, would have required not one, not two, but three entertainment holding companies to agree on those characters all appearing in the same product, despite the fact they occupy the same damn comic books. Marvel sold off the film rights for its characters to a variety of big Hollywood studios in a bid to stave off bankruptcy when the comics industry underwent hard times in the ‘90s.

This continues to have knock-on effects beyond even Marvel’s filmography. Wonder why Sony continues to limp along year after year making thoroughly godawful movies about Spider-Man villains that do not feature Spider-Man? Well, Sony inexplicably still owns the rights to those characters and so is obligated to keep making them. (You, dear reader, are not obligated to keep watching them, and for Sony and Russell Crowe’s sake if not for your own, you may want to stop doing that if you still are.)

So, with Disney acquiring Marvel in 2009, with The Avengers debuting to box office victory in 2012 and with the rights to Daredevil reverting to Disney from Fox at around that same time, the opportunity to bring that character back to the big screen seemed ripe. Daredevil series creator Drew Goddard pitched a grittier, more down-to-earth movie, but Disney wanted to go big.

Wouldn’t Daredevil—resolutely a street-level, thug-punchin’ hero with powers that don’t require a bunch of green screen or rotoscoping—be a better fit for television? And with streaming removing pesky barriers like strict episode lengths, jockeying for primetime positioning, or requiring large numbers of episodes, what better medium to test the idea?

It worked like gangbusters, spawning a run of critically successful shows that established a stable of characters and actors who fans seem to love. We are now 10 years out from this winning gambit, and yet we’re only welcoming the fourth season of this show this month. Let’s talk about why, and why it’s still a minor miracle.

The Show

Daredevil’s first season is in some ways what one would call peak “Surf Dracula,” which is to say, constantly teasing viewers with the promise of Daredevil going in against the Kingpin, but really only donning the costume in one of the last scenes. He is never actually called “Daredevil,” either—coming to be known as “the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.” This is less of a crime when you actually make your show really good, though.

In the charming part of New York that’s come to be known as Hell’s Kitchen, Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) are new lawyers with an ambitious plan to defend the innocent and champion the downtrodden in court. Murdock is blind—we see the moment of his disfigurement as a boy in a car crash/chemical spill accident, and then hear his cryptic visit to a Catholic confessional. He asks forgiveness not for what he has done, but for what he is about to do. We discover that this is to dress all in black, his eyes completely obscured by a mask, and beat the absolute piss out of some human traffickers who are right in the middle of trafficking humans. Murdock’s blindness is mitigated by his preternatural hearing—so keen as to broadcast the voices of criminals to him from blocks away, to discern truth from lies by zeroing in on someone’s heartbeat, and to unerringly echolocate enemies in a brawl.

Nelson and Murdock (the men and their fledgling firm) quickly become embroiled in a deadly coverup gone wrong. Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll, now also a darling in the tabletop roleplaying game community), a secretary at a construction firm, wakes up to discover herself framed for a grisly murder. We learn she unwittingly discovered an apparent money laundering scheme at her job, one that is tied in with a cabal of shadowy gangsters who won’t utter their leader’s name during their late night meetings. All of this leads to Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio, clearly enjoying himself), a criminal mastermind with a painful past and megalomaniacal ambitions for New York.

Not all of the show’s cloak-and-dagger machinations work perfectly (Fisk defaults to murder awfully quickly for a guy who wants to keep a low profile). It doesn’t matter, though, because three other things consistently work great across the show’s three-season run.

The fights just work.

If you’re going to make a show about a vigilante like Daredevil, a guy with no power greater than that of his fists and feet, the standard MCU fight choreography simply will not do. Steven DeKnight, who took over showrunning duties from Goddard once the series got off the ground, credits influences like Taxi Driver for the show’s urban grit and The Raid for its fantastic, messy, rage-fueled fight sequences. Besides the visceral quality and complexity to the sequences, it’s also worth it to mention that the show seemingly took another incredibly important lesson from The Raid: A fight sequence reads better when you don’t cut away so much and when you actually spend time establishing the battleground so viewers understand the space and know what is happening where! Daredevil’s Season 1 Episode 2 hallway fight scene—engineered with some post-production trickery to appear as if it’s done in one take—looks right out of a Gareth Evans movie in the best way. A decade later, and vanishingly little in the greater MCU catalogue, film or streaming television, has come anywhere close to how poetically brutal even the least impressive Daredevil fights look.

The cast just works.

Daredevil isn’t going to win any awards for perfectly naturalistic dialogue, but the actors all have undeniable chemistry and audiences evidently loved them. Even during the long hiatus between when Daredevil stopped dropping new seasons on Netflix in 2018 and Disney Plus’s new Daredevil: Born Again this month, Marvel has signalled that it wants Daredevil’s cast back. The chief reason it seemed foolish to tear it all down and start over is that we want to see Cox and Woll kiss, damn it.

And, the interpretation of these characters just works (except for Elektra in Season 2, which is deeply unfortunate).

Cox’s Murdock is a rage-fueled, guilt-addled Catholic nearly paralyzed by the contradiction at his core, that violence has become the only way he can see to bring about justice even as he believes that his day job should be enough. D’Onofrio is a man who endured systematic abuse who seems, despite all his scheming and domineering, to simply want to be loved. Henson’s Foggy Nelson is the comic relief, but also a voice of reason for Murdock. As the show progresses, Foggy and Karen are eventually brought into Daredevil’s confidence, leading to some of the most compelling character moments for all of them.

We can’t dwell too much on Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle here—whose story arc leading up to him becoming The Punisher is far and away the best part of the show’s second season. We will get to him, though, and soon.

The show’s third season once again put Daredevil back in his all-black, low-rent, Frank Miller-run-inspired outfit, culminating in what every fan of the character had been chomping at the bit to see: Just a blood-soaked, bone-crunching fistfight between Daredevil and the Kingpin, one which ends in Daredevil screaming in the guy’s face as he drags himself back from the moral precipice of just killing the guy. Fisk’s wife Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer, also reprising her role in Born Again) looks on sorrowfully, and Fisk surrenders in order to protect her. What more could one want out of a Daredevil adaptation?

The Shenanigans

Apparently, one could want that show to be entirely vertically integrated into Disney’s streaming environment, and for the rest of us to go pound sand while waiting seven whole years for this near-perfectly realized show to come back. Indeed, apart from Daredevil’s cameo in Spider-Man: No Way Home and a guest spot in She Hulk, Cox and his jolly pals have gotten up to precious little deviltry or punishment for the better part of a decade. D’Onofrio has fared better, with appearances in Hawkeye and Echo, but the Kingpin is only at his best when dancing with the Devil.

With Disney’s launching of Disney Plus in 2019, the Mouse House suddenly seemed less keen on its properties streaming on any other platform—why, indeed, should they not capture every last cent? Why not save themselves the server farm expenditure and just grant Netflix or Hulu or one of the other perfectly capable extant streamers exclusive access to their massive catalog? Why not obligate consumers to subscribe to another service if they ever just want to put on The Little Mermaid for their kids?

One must ask: Why, if you have all the pieces in place, that perfect alchemy of the right actors, the right action, writers who clearly know what they are doing, is slightly less money worse than no money at all for seven years?

Disney must know something I don’t, I guess. At least they also seem to know that fans would have howled betrayal had they not gotten Cox and Bernthal back to collecting teeth.

What’s Next?

Daredevil: Born Again is now on Disney Plus, and already strong out of the gate with Matt Murdock rinsing corrupt cops and the promise of Bernthal back in his skull shirt. Will Frank Castle punish people? With guns? While screaming and covered in gore? Odds look good, true believers.

Tier Ranking

By virtue of rocking hard when it could easily have sucked, by virtue of trying (and succeeding) to emulate action movies of the time that were actually good, in recognition of a cast so beloved that there was basically never any doubt they’d be brought back even in light of Disney’s tiresome meddling, and for introducing a better Punisher even than that of the totally earnest and committed Thomas Jane, Netflix’s Daredevil sticks a three-point landing in our S-tier, with its eyes closed.

Next month, Streaming Marvel returns for a look at Daredevil’s friend and foil, the Netflix original The Punisher.

Kenneth Lowe is a regular contributor to Paste TV. You can follow him on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social. To support his fiction, join his Patreon.