TV Review: Marvel's Daredevil Season 1

The horned one goes from Affleck to Netflix.

Review by Brandon Wolfe

Daredevil, Marvel’s “man without fear,” got off to a fairly disastrous live-action start with an eponymous theatrical film in 2003 starring Ben Affleck. That film, an overly melodramatic, atrociously clichéd instance of pre-Iron Man superhero detritus (albeit one with a killer Evanescence song), was so poorly received that it spawned neither a sequel nor a reboot (even 2005’s horrible Fantastic Four got both), the rights languishing in limbo for a decade before reverting back to Marvel Studios, their rightful owner. Rather than inject Daredevil into its intricate cinematic tapestry, Marvel, always eager to expand their reign in the bid for complete pop-cultural domination, went a different route, opting instead to launch Daredevil as a binge-friendly Netflix event series, the first of several it has planned. While it might have initially seemed as though such a significant character, one who once anchored a major studio tentpole film, would be wasted on a smaller canvas, Daredevil ultimately makes perfect sense shrunken down to TV size, even if the series constructed around him has some kinks to work out.

Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) is a young attorney, just starting to build a practice with his best friend, Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson). As a child, Matt was blinded in an accident when hazardous waste found its way into his eyes. Though robbed of his sight, the accident had the curious side effect of enhancing Matt’s remaining senses to superhuman extremes, such to where he’s more keenly aware of his surroundings than the sighted people around him. Matt’s loving father, a prizefighter, was killed when Matt was younger after he refused to throw a fight and lost some criminal types a lot of money. His death left Matt with a Batmanian thirst for righting wrongs, in a courtroom by day and on the streets at night, where he patrols from the rooftops of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen as a black-masked ninja vigilante, kickboxing thugs and protecting the innocent. An urban legend at first, Matt’s exploits quickly put him on the radar of Hell’s Kitchen’s most wanted, placing him on a deadly collision course with Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), a shadowy kingpin as mysterious to the outside world as Matt himself.

The biggest strength of Daredevil is its frequent deployment of violent action. Though often shot too darkly-lit and close-up to fully appreciate (action-wise, it’s the American way), there is still enough skillful choreography on display to make a strong impression. Moreover, the fights are extremely brutal, showcasing a surprising amount of blood and gore. When Matt, who constantly receives as much abuse as he dishes out, takes his licks, it’s ugly and visceral. Daredevil fully takes advantage of its Netflix status, offering up a darker, more adult glimpse at the seedier side of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The theatrical films in the MCU have been candy-colored and family-friendly, having to hone just as much of an edge as they can get away with while still being able to hawk Slurpee cups to toddlers. Likewise, Marvel’s existing television shows, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter, have each been calibrated to be completely safe for a home viewing audience. Daredevil, however, is under no such obligation to pare its content down for all-ages appropriateness. Heads are smashed to pulp in car doors, people say naughty words and there are even the occasional hints of sexuality, the likes of which an Avengers film could never touch beyond a mildly risqué aside from Tony Stark. Daredevil can, and does, go places other Marvel projects could never dream.

Yet Daredevil’s freedom comes at a price. The series lacks the wit that infuses Marvel’s films. Though restrained to an extent by the need for four-quadrant audience saturation, the Marvel films have always felt loose and sharp, filled with a giddy playfulness, vivid characters and crisp dialogue. The movies feel alive in a way that their blockbuster contemporaries have largely failed to achieve. Daredevil, on the other hand, seems to feel that its mature content necessitates that fun and frivolity be sacrificed. The dialogue that runs throughout all 13 episodes is the sort of leaden, overcooked drivel heard in superhero projects outside the Marvel umbrella, replete with endless pseudo-profundities about the nature of evil and the moral weight that bears down a man’s soul. To be perfectly frank, it’s a drag to listen to people on this show speak. The aura of seriousness that hangs over Daredevil is oppressive, its killjoy sensibilities owing more to Christopher Nolan’s Batman films than anything with a Marvel logo at the front of it.

The characters that populate Daredevil also leave much to be desired. Cox is fine as Murdock, but the character never quite pops the way he feels like he ought to. The tortured-hero archetype that he presents is at odds with what we have come to expect from a Marvel Universe protagonist, which might be fine if the show had found a unique method of approaching that traditional character type that set him apart from the scads of similar downbeat heroes we’ve seen. D’Onofrio cuts a suitably imposing figure as Fisk, but opts for a gruffly whispered delivery that hits the ear oddly. Henson is out of his depth as Foggy, hitting his comic-relief marks as gratingly as possible. Rounding out the cast are Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page, a woman rescued by Matt who winds up working as his and Foggy’s secretary, Rosario Dawson as Claire Temple, Matt’s nurse love interest, and Vondie Curtis-Hall as Ben Urich, a veteran journalist chasing the threads of both Matt and Fisk. They are all very, very solemn.

In addition to being free from network content restraints, Daredevil is also free of network length constraints, which it revels in as each episode runs an average of 55 minutes, more than ten minutes longer than a standard hour-long drama. This results in some fairly significant pacing issues, as dialogue scenes are allowed to run on much longer than what should have been their natural lifespan. In addition, it cedes the floor to a lot of dead weight, such as an excruciatingly dull subplot where Page and Urich chase the paper trail leading to Fisk. This thread runs through the entirety of the 13-episode season and is never remotely in danger of being interesting, nor does it seem to serve a purpose beyond providing a couple of peripheral characters with things to do. There is the persistent sense that Daredevil could have either run for ten episodes at this extended episode length or should have cut the 13 down to the standard 44 minutes of broadcast-length television. All that extra fat does the series approximately zero favors.

At its best, Daredevil suggests a stronger version of what is being attempted by Fox’s Gotham, a similarly deathly serious, comics-derived meditation on what it means to stand up to corruption and villainy in an urban snakepit. That show’s utter banality and penchant toward camp awfulness are mercifully absent, as is the bush-league tediousness of Marvel’s own Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. The series feels cinematic in ways that its superhero-TV contemporaries often visibly strain to achieve, and once more, its bone-crunching fight sequences are often remarkable. Yet it stands as the very model of grim-faced stodginess that Marvel has issued a rebuke to in recent years. The series doesn’t seem to realize that being dark and violent doesn’t automatically preclude having a good time (NBC’s Hannibal, from which Daredevil appears to have modeled its opening-credits sequence, is the best current example of how to thread that needle). Marvel once stepped in and effectively told the superhero genre to lighten up, but if they’ve forgotten their own mission statement, who’s going to remind them?

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