Daredevil: Born Again Is A (Kind Of) Fearless Revival Of The Netflix Show

When Daredevil debuted on Netflix a decade ago, it was one of a kind. A white-knuckle thriller bathed in Catholic angst, Netflix’s Daredevil emerged at the height of the superhero genre’s grim-dark era and became one of its most prolific representatives. But its era of hallway fights and tortured rooftop monologues has long passed, with Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock receiving a lighter makeover (figuratively and literally) to smoothly bring him into the MCU proper. But with MCU fatigue, and nostalgia for the grim-dark superhero days of old, stronger than ever, Daredevil’s status in the MCU started to become a big question mark. What would a contemporary Daredevil look like in this era of the MCU? The answer, much like its eternally turmoiled hero, is of two minds.

Daredevil: Born Again, Marvel’s much-hyped reboot on Disney+, is a show in the throes of an identity crisis. It’s hard not to watch its nine-episode first season and be reminded of the show it originally was — a lighthearted courtroom procedural in which Matt Murdock never dons his costume — because that’s what takes up the majority of its first half. It’s only when the show and Matt himself start to give into darker impulses that Born Again starts to really kick into gear — if only because that’s when it starts to feel like the original Netflix iteration. Is it nostalgia working overtime, or is superhero fatigue making us resistant to a sunnier side to Matt Murdock? It’s difficult to answer that for now, but there’s an undeniable delight to seeing Matt Murdock scream in anguish as he pulverizes his enemies’ bones into a fine dust.

Daredevil: Born Again takes place five years after the end of Daredevil Season 3, though it feels like we never left. Matt, Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) have turned their law firm into one of the pillars of Hell’s Kitchen, and they are celebrating the pending closure of a case when tragedy strikes. In a targeted massacre by Daredevil’s old enemy Benjamin Poindexter, aka Bullseye (Wilson Bethel), Foggy is murdered, leading a grief-stricken Karen to flee New York and Matt to hang up the mask. Cut to a year later, and Matt has long given up the Daredevil identity, choosing to “let the system work.”

He’s opened up a new, high-powered law firm with a new partner, Kirsten McDuffie (Nikki M. James), and (finally) moved out of Hell’s Kitchen. But his past comes back to haunt him when Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) successfully runs for mayor, promising to revitalize the crime-ridden city and rid it of its countless vigilantes. It only takes Fisk’s troubling rise to power, along with a case involving the vigilante White Tiger and a serial murderer named Muse, to drag Matt Murdock back into the seedy underworld of crime-fighting that he had once put behind him.

There are two shows within Born Again, yet strangely, they’re never truly at odds with each other. The lighter half resides firmly in the MCU, with Born Again dutifully filling itself up with cameos from other Disney+ shows like Ms. Marvel and Hawkeye, while allowing Matt to flirt and banter his way through a lighthearted legal procedural. But even as the show forges a new, sunnier path for Matt (complete with a much-brighter visual direction that leaves much to be desired), keeping him out of the costume for a good half of the show, showrunner Dario Scardapane lovingly shows a fidelity to the original series’ tone and characters that shines throughout the season.

And any frustrations fans may have with seeing Matt out of the costume for so long is offset by a spectacular Fisk storyline, which runs parallel to Murdock’s legal adventures. As Fisk settles into office, the show plays coy with whether he’s truly reformed or whether he’s still the Kingpin playing the long game — a fascinating conflict that’s played out in Fisk’s interactions with his ambitious staffer and protégé Daniel Blake (a terrifically slippery Michael Gandolfini) and with his estranged wife, Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer). While the political intrigue is a bit simple compared to previous Daredevil seasons, it’s miles more sophisticated than anything else the MCU has been able to pull off.

The second version of the show kicks off when Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) bulldozes his way back into Matt Murdock’s life, delivering an electrifying standoff that singlehandedly revives the feeling of the Netflix show at its height — that grim-dark attitude that’s simultaneously a little too self-serious and also endearingly sincere. It’s the same feeling that the first episode’s barnburner of an opening fight scene also manages to recapture, and one that the show is frustratingly sparse with.

But despite the narrative awkwardness (including one man-on-the-street framing device that doesn’t quite work) and tonal inconsistency that comes with consolidating two different ideas of a show, Born Again is undoubtedly engaging TV. And that’s because Born Again wisely centers itself around the same main strength of the Netflix show: its performances. The handful of new characters — including a winsome Margarita Levieva as Matt’s new love interest, an earthy Clark Johnson as Matt’s new ex-cop ally Cherry, and especially the power-hungry Gandolfini — are solid, but the best performances are in the old ones. Cox is clearly reveling in playing the turmoiled man without fear again, finding a new flavor of angst to play as Matt falls in love with Levieva’s anti-vigilante therapist Heather Glenn. D’Onofrio is pitch-perfect as always, somehow finding more shades of gray within his nuanced, thorny portrayal of Fisk. Zurer digs her teeth into a meatier role as an ever-scheming Vanessa. And even in their brief appearances, Bernthal and Woll remind us of the magic they conjured in those early seasons of Daredevil.

In one of the rare cases of “nostalgia is good, actually!” Daredevil: Born Again is at its strongest when it feels less like a revival than a continuation of the old show. The lightness of the season’s early episodes are refreshing, but don’t feel like they totally fit. Like its hero, maybe Daredevil is always destined to be half in the dark, anyway.

The first two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again are streaming now on Disney+. New episodes are released weekly on Tuesdays.