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Comic-book storytelling has long seemed more compatible with the arc of a
television season than it is with film: For all the success of superhero movies
that can devote their inflated budgets to special effects, two hours simply
isn’t enough time to do anything truly interesting with plot. Marvel has been
playing with longer narrative arcs for years now with its films, which are
knitted together within one big, interlinked universe. But the strong first
season of Daredevil, which just dropped on the binge-friendly Netflix as 13
episodes, proves the material might have finally found its perfect medium.
Comic-book adaptations may well be reaching saturation point for casual fans,
and if not yet, they probably will soon with the amount of competing “cinematic
universes” on the horizon aping Marvel’s approach. But all the comic-book
company (now a multimedia conglomerate owned by Disney) is doing is repeating a
formula that has worked with readers for more than 50 years—replicating the
thrill of keeping up with long, evolving stories that can bump into and cross
over with each other. This has mostly taken place on film, involving godlike
heroes like Thor or Captain America, but with Daredevil, Marvel is smartly
building out another vital branch of its brand—the smaller-scale heroes who
patrol the streets of New York and save a few people—rather than whole planets
or galaxies—at a time.
From the very beginning, the show, Marvel’s first Netflix series, is preoccupied
with questions
of morality. But more than anything else, it’s a show about how far things need
to go before they get better. Set in a bombed out New York, the city, we’re told
early and often, is in desperate need of saving. Corruption has crept its way
into every corner of life — law enforcement, commerce, even basic things like
housing — and how to root it out is at the show’s core. But Daredevil’s morality
can’t easily be defined as good versus evil. When your protagonist is a blind
vigilante who beats down thugs as much for sport as for a higher purpose, you’re
talking about evil versus lesser evil, or about doing abject, unforgivable
things for the greater good. In its uncompromising depiction of that struggle,
Marvel manages to make this series great.
The series’ conceit, in blurring the line between hero and villain, isn’t
especially novel. The mild-mannered professional by day, crime fighter by night
trope invites immediate comparison to The Dark Knight trilogy and shows like
Arrow. But Daredevil shines in the execution, which is as inspired as it is
dark, darker than anything Marvel or DC has so far depicted onscreen.
It manages that first by being bloodier than anything audiences have seen out of
the Big Two so far. This show is gruesome. The bloodletting is relentless here;
at one point, a character slams his own head through a wall spike just to make a
point. But what really sets this apart from the rest of the Marvel Cinematic
Universe is that Daredevil shows how superheroes fail us. The Avengers saved the
world, but the New York they left behind is still scarred for it. Crime took
root in the wreckage, and heroes like Iron Man are nowhere in sight. Matt
Murdock is the kind of hero that environment now needs: the first street-level
hero willing to get his hands dirty. And the blood he and those around him spill
is a constant reminder of how morally compromised his part of the city has
become. This is what the world is like with superheroes in it. This is how
things go too far. It’s as cruel as it is compelling, adding weight to the
proceedings without leaning so much on older stories as to prevent the story
from standing on its own.
Daredevil centers around Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), an attorney in Hell’s
Kitchen who was raised by a big-hearted, small-time boxer and blinded at a young
age by some requisite
mysterious chemicals. When Daredevil was created by Stan Lee in 1964, Hell’s
Kitchen was the West Side Story-esque bad neighborhood of old Manhattan, not the
gentrified place it’s become now, and this Daredevil sticks to the original vibe
without getting too hokey. By day, Matt is a do-gooder lawyer trying to set up a
practice with his law-school buddy Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson); by night, he
battles organized crime in a ninja outfit, taking advantage of his remaining
heightened senses and magical radar vision to keep one step ahead of everyone.
As a comic-book character, Daredevil has always felt most evocative when New
York is in dire straits. Writer and artist Frank Miller’s brooding take on the
character in the late 70s and early 80s, when the city was mired in recession
and rising crime, remains the definitive one. Indeed, the only thing that
Daredevil could protect citizens of the current Hell's Kitchen from is rent
control. Brian Michael Bendis’ four-year run as writer, starting in December
2001, acknowledged New York’s long shadow of post-9/11 paranoia and fear. Those
separate arcs clearly serve as the major inspiration for the show’s creator Drew
Goddard and its show runner Steven DeKnight; their Daredevil is pitch-dark and
gritty, sometimes to the extent that you can barely tell what’s happening on
screen.
As Matt Murdock, Cox brings a quiet charm and Catholic guilt that makes him
immediately sympathetic. The character simmers when he’s onscreen, only boiling
over when he lets rage consume him as the masked hero. This is a good man
capable of doing terrible things, and he’s good at what he does. He’s joined by
a cast that all embody some moral struggle that exposes how broken New York has
become. Elden Henson plays Murdock’s best friend and legal partner Franklin
"Foggy" Nelson, an essentially good lawyer still smarting from the pair turning
down a lucrative position at a corrupt law firm. Foggy is meant, at times to
provide the series some lighter moments. Unfortunately, the character is
sometimes grating. True Blood alum Deborah Ann Woll plays Karen Page, a victim
of the show’s core criminal plot whose past on the show is likely as checkered
as her troubled past in the comics. Rosario Dawson plays Claire Temple, a night
shift nurse who stitches Murdock up despite witnessing his penchant for
violence. And Vondie Curtis-Hall plays Ben Urich, probably the most storied
investigative journalist in all of Marvel, as he wrestles with how to help bring
the city’s darker influences down without getting himself or those he cares
about killed.
But the real highlight here is Vincent D’Onofrio’s take on Wilson Fisk, the
Kingpin of Crime. In
the past, Fisk has been portrayed as a fearsome crime lord only posing as a
legitimate businessman, serving as the arch-enemy of superheroes like
Spider-Man, the Punisher, and especially Daredevil. Here, he’s Murdock’s twisted
reflection. They want the same thing — that is, to make their city a better
place. But, where Murdock wants to stamp out crime one punch at a time, Fisk
wants to dismantle the underworld from the inside, even if that means dirtying
his hands with drugs and human trafficking.
Who’s really serving the greater good? The show offers no easy answer outside of
our knowledge that we are watching a show called Daredevil, and the titular
character is supposed to be our hero. But D’Onofrio makes Fisk charming in his
way — in one early episode, we see him fumble awkwardly on a date with a woman
he admires. And Fisk states outright he takes no pleasure in his criminal
activity, while we can only wonder as to how much pleasure Murdock takes in
ripping his enemies apart.
With so many new superhero shows on television, Daredevil successfully raises
the bar. As Marvel’s crop of TV projects have been safe, and frankly dull
(Agents of SHIELD, Agent Carter), Daredevil pushes the envelope by going down
dark paths the Marvel Cinematic Universe hasn’t gone down before. This isn’t
about aliens saving planets. It’s about one man taking on mass murderers with
his bare hands. That this can be more compelling than what we’ve seen in
theaters bodes well for what Netflix has coming next. Daredevil is the first in
a series of street-level solo series dramas Marvel is making with Netflix. All
are scheduled for the near future and will eventually unite into a miniseries
called The Defenders-because the studio can’t do anything without thinking three
years ahead. There are certainly kinks to work out in the formula, but while
every other studio is rushing to replicate what Marvel accomplished on the big
screen, this new bulwark seems like an exciting next step.
No problem gets solved within one episode, but as soon as the credits are
rolling, Netflix is prodding you to watch the next chapter. It’s no different
than buying a trade paperback and devouring a year of comic-book storytelling in
one sitting. A network show like Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on ABC has some
obligation to keep things simple enough to follow along with week to week;
Daredevil is its graphic-novel cousin, meatier and more ambitious, and
succeeding on those grounds even though the pace is slower. Since embarking on
adapting its own properties, Marvel has done well to make its adaptations
accessible to the general public. Daredevil represents a leap into more niche
territory, and the results are encouragingly different.
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