First Impressions: Disney’s Daredevil, Bored Again

It looks like what it is, a legacy sequel.

(Note: For my new readers, I make a distinction between First Impressions of a series and a full Recommends.  A TV series might start out weak and finish strong or vice versa. My  Recommends is a review of the whole of the season, First Impressions as the name implies is just the first episode or two.)

By 2015 the words Marvel and juggernaut were nearly inseparable. There had been a string of record-setting box office blowouts, including a sci-fi space opera where the comic book characters were no better known than DC’s Tommy Tomorrow and the Planeteers but still raked in $770 million. 

Marvel was in a position to take risks. Controlled risks. Guardians of the Galaxy had been one such gamble.  Ike Perlmutter decided to move forward with adult themed content, but Disney wanted it kept at arm’s distance. Fine, Perlmutter decided, Netflix it is. The Fox purchase was nowhere on the horizon back then, so they had to go with characters that they owned but hadn’t utilized.  The Defenders was selected and Daredevil was the best known member of the team. 

Charlie Cox was hired to play Matt Murdoch.  Netflix bought the series, and for three years, Daredevil was the best superhero show on TV, unless you preferred The Punisher. The characters were deeply layered, the tone was appropriately dark for a neighborhood known as Hell’s Kitchen, the fight choreography was the best seen on TV in the 2010s and there was real competition for that title. The famous hallway fight scene that was done in a single take is now iconic. 

What made it work so well was that the stakes were appropriately small.  Matt Murdoch’s enemies didn’t want to blow up the Earth, they wanted to rob banks. It kept things real or as real as they are going to be in a superhero show. The performers all delivered stellar work.  Vincent D'Onofrio’s take on the erudite though brutal thug, King Pin was the absolute standout.

And then it vanished in 2018.  There were several reasons for that.  Given how successful it was, the cast and creators wanted raises, however, Daredevil had generated all the subscriptions it was going to.  So far as Netflix was concerned, the show was decreasing in value while increasing in price. On the other side of the table, there had been a successful coup at Marvel, Bob Iger had promoted Ike Perlmutter into a “Window Seat” and turned Marvel completely over to Kevin Feige.  The Netflix TV division had not been under his control (outrageous) and its storylines had nothing to do with his Grand Design for Phase III (unthinkable).  Bob Iger’s Disney Plus project was gaining momentum and he would soon need all the content it could gather.  Small problem there.  Netflix has a ticking bomb clause built into all its contracts, when they cancel a show, the IP is locked up for three years.  Hence the saying, “Done on Netflix means done for good.”

For once this wasn’t a problem for the IP owner.  Feige shut down the entire Netflix television unit, fired everyone, then waited for the contract to run out. 

   

It was supposed to come back to life on Disney Plus in 2021, it didn’t until this year.  Covid was part of the problem but a bigger issue was the Great Woke Meltdown. While Victoria Alonso was in ascendence at Marvel pissed off lesbians with chips on their shoulders was the order of the day and everyone knew it. 

The fans were not particularly wild about Alonso making a skinsuit version of Daredevil and Jon Bernthal made it clear that since the Punisher was now his signature role he wasn’t going to sign up for something that would drag Frank Castle’s name through the feminist mud.

You can see what was intended for Matt Murdoch in the abysmal She-Hulk series. However, with regime changes and boxoffice failures abounding, it was decided to return or at least try to return to something that felt like Netflix’s Daredevil. 

Which by the way is now ten years old.

That long of a gap is enough to turn Disney’s Daredevil from a continuation of the original series into a legacy sequel.  It has also become clear that the scripts from the Alonso era version were not trashed, just reworked.  It is painfully obvious that this screenplay started life in the Black Lives Matter era.

The show opens with Matt, Karen, and Foggy celebrating some kind of win or another at Josie’s Bar. Seeing three white people together on screen in a current year Disney production was honestly startling.  We meet a few of the new cast members who are more ethnically gifted. Three white leads is simply unacceptable in a 2025 Disney/Marvel production and I’m not joking either, it directly violates inclusivity policies and directives of the Walt Disney Company and (as it turned out) the Federal government as well. 

So, Foggy was murdered in the first fifteen minutes. This is to provide cheap emotional engagement and it went over about as well as Newt dying off-screen in Alien 3. Karen was supposed to die too, but that was rewritten when fans of the OG series heard about it.  

There is now a fight between Daredevil and the murderer. Time to serve up a big helping of memberberries. You know how they tried to remake the Hall Fight from Netflix in Echo and it sucked ass because the actress only has one freaking leg?  Yeah, this one is a better retread than that, so props Marvel.  They fight their way upstairs.  Charlie Cox is trying his best, but there is a big difference between 32 and 42 years old.  He was genuinely exhausted fighting his way up three flights of stairs and it showed.

They fight on the roof for a little bit with Daredevil getting the upper hand. Then Matt hears Foggy’s heart stop beating and so he chucks the guy off the roof. 

As a result, Karen leaves the series, and Matt swears off being Daredevil and decides he’s now in it for the money so he joins a high-profile, high-income firm.  I’m not sure how he managed that, since that kind of a law firm is not going to be wild about picking up a criminal lawyer who mostly works pro-bono.  Whatever, it’s Disney.  Also, the guy he yeeted off the roof lived so I don’t get the drama. Karen is still a very good person, she lives in San Francisco now. Of course. 

Now we reach the show’s biggest weakness. King Pin. This antagonist character has been utterly humbled, humiliated and beaten into obsequious quivering jelly by the strong, independent whamen of Hawkeye, and of Echo as well.  You can’t possibly take King Pin seriously as a major threat after seeing him pounded flat by 90 lb waifs in two other mini-series. 

This leaves me with the rather surprising assumption that Disney/Marvel is desperately hoping you didn’t see either of them.

This is no small hope.  

So about King Pin. He’s Trump now.  That’s it really.  He gets elected mayor of New York City and the people who voted for him are all ignorant and white.  The cops are either good guys opposed to King Pin being mayor or George Floyd throttling bigots and criminals.  Like I said, it feels very much like a script written in the Summer of Mostly Peaceful Rioting got reworked.

This legacy sequel is trying its best to come across as a continuation of the Netflix series, but the magic just is NOT there.  This show is just plain boring. King Pin is a broken villain who has so far been doing the whole “I’m not that guy anymore” so you have to forgive me for all of my horrifying crimes thing. And Daredevil kills two corrupt cops at the end of episode two.  Again, the criminal that killed Foggy is alive.

In summary, it’s the best Marvel series Disney has produced and that ain’t saying much.  Punisher is due to show up next week, hopefully that will improve things.

Discuss in the comments below.