Marvel’s Daredevil Season One
Marvel has managed to completely reinvigorate the superhero movie in a massive way with the Netflix Series Daredevil. It all began with 2008’s Iron Man and then spread out to the rest of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, culminating in the release of 2012’s The Avengers. But since then, Marvel hasn’t been content to just focus on the big league superheroes. Daredevil is just the first of four planned series Marvel is making for Netflix, and will be followed by AKA Jessica Jones, then Luke Cage and finally Iron Fist before all four combine for a four-eight episode Defenders mini-series.
The freedom offered by a platform like Netflix has really expanded the potential of TV superheroes. Although DC’s Arrow and The Flash have shown that TV can be a viable platform for superheroes, Daredevil has taken that baton and used it as a billy club to beat back the competition, elevating it to a whole new level and opening the door to expanded possibilities.
When we first meet Matt Murdock in Marvel and Netflix’s Daredevil, he’s a nine-year-old boy laid out on the street immediately after a terrible traffic accident. Matt saved an elderly man’s life, but toxic chemicals seeped into his eyes, causing him to lose his sight. Of course, as we will soon learn, he also gained some special sensory gifts that fateful day.
Years later, grown-up Matt (Charlie Cox) asks forgiveness in a confessional — not for what he’s done, but what he’s about to do. The next time we see him he’s head-to-toe in skintight black, wearing a mask with no eye slits while beating the daylights of human traffickers in NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen. Using MMA fighting skills with a ninja twist, Matt’s alter ego Daredevil is unlike other superheroes: he’s not out to save the world, he’s out to save the neighborhood.
By day, Matt’s a budding defense attorney, along with his partner/best bud Foggy Nelson (Mocking jay’s Elden Henson). Their first client, Karen Page (True Blood’s Deborah Ann Woll) is wrongly framed for murder — Matt’s super-senses read her heartbeat like a lie detector. Meanwhile, the coldly calculating right-hand man of the city’s still mysterious, not-to-be-named-out-loud crime “Kingpin,” attempts to orchestrate her murder. Karen needs more defending that Nelson & Murdock can provide.
Armed with pitch-perfect casting, a deep bench of story material from the acclaimed comic book series, street-level drama with a gritty Taxi Driver-style aesthetic, and astonishing fight sequences on par with the Marvel films, Daredevil has the potential to become one of the best TV adaptations of a superhero property ever.
Daredevil doesn’t even meet his main nemesis, Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), a.k.a. the Kingpin, until about halfway through the season, and even then, the series takes a methodical path to introducing Fisk as a human being. His first major sequence highlights the massive crime lord’s sensitivity and loneliness, as he attempts to woo a warm, flirtatious gallery owner, Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer).
The show’s entire narrative stems from Fisk’s quietly devastating plan to buy up most of Hell’s Kitchen for presumably nefarious purposes, but he sincerely believes he’s doing what’s best for his city, just as Murdock does. In this sense, Daredevil‘s story does get a bit repetitive at times, but is broken up by an increasingly broad swath of subplots.
Daredevil is himself a symbol of a desperate kind of law, the augmentation of Lady Justice to match an era where money is prized over the security of a powerful magistrate, and though Goddard never lets the cynicism of this world override the joy and wonder of Daredevil, it’s clear that he’s spoiling for a good fight.
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