Daredevil: Born Again and the Ghost of the Netflix Show

Disney+ released Daredevil: Born Again across nine episodes in March and April 2025. The production history is the story. An original version of the show was filmed through 2023, largely under showrunner Matt Corman and Chris Ord, with a specific mandate to break from the Netflix-era Daredevil (2015-2018) and deliver something closer to the standard MCU-TV house style. That version was scrapped, not completely but substantially, after Marvel’s internal review indicated it was not landing. Dario Scardapane, a veteran of The Punisher and specifically of the Netflix-era Marvel shows, was brought in. Significant portions were reshot. The tone was reworked. Original directors came back, including Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, whose Moon Knight work I have complained about at length in other places but whose action-staging in this show is a different animal.

What we got, after all of that, is a show that is better than the original version would have been, and that spends its nine episodes essentially negotiating with the fact that it was not allowed to be a direct continuation of the Netflix show until, finally, in the back half, it gives up and becomes one anyway.

The original compromise

The public version of the reshoot story is that the first version of the show was more “legal procedural” and less “street-level noir.” Matt Murdock was going to be the lawyer. Daredevil the vigilante was going to be a relatively minor element. This is the Marvel-TV instinct at its worst: take the property, extract the element that was distinctive, smooth the distinctive element into something more broadly acceptable, and release the smoothed version.

Scardapane’s version added back the noir. It put Charlie Cox in the suit more often. It leaned on the religious-guilt iconography of the Netflix-era show. It brought back specific characters (Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle, Wilson Bethel’s Bullseye, and in the finale, D’Onofrio’s full-weight Kingpin) who had been, in the first version, sidelined or reduced. This is, on one level, a retreat. The show’s original intention was to move beyond the Netflix template. The released show is, functionally, a Netflix-era continuation in new network colours.

I am fine with this. The Netflix template was good. The Netflix template was, for my money, the best sustained superhero television the 2010s produced. Returning to it is not a failure. It is a recognition of what was working.

The Cox-D’Onofrio axis

Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock and Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk remain the best adversarial pairing American superhero TV has ever produced. The show’s first few episodes keep them apart, structurally, by having Fisk run for Mayor of New York and by having Matt (for specific reasons I will not spoil) step back from the Daredevil identity. This separation was, I think, the biggest structural mistake of the released version of the show. The whole reason the pairing works is that the two actors are at their best when they are operating in proximity, even when they are not directly sharing scenes.

When the show finally puts them in a room together, in the eighth episode, the whole season snaps into focus. The scene is about twelve minutes. It is mostly two men having a conversation at a specific institutional venue in Manhattan. The staging, by Benson and Moorhead, is precise: a long table, both men seated at the same end, a specific low-angle approach that lets D’Onofrio’s mass register against Cox’s leaner frame. Neither actor raises his voice. The dialogue is, operationally, about a specific political question. Underneath, the two men are reestablishing the specific psychological equilibrium that the Netflix show had built them into across three seasons, and both of them know it.

Cox is still doing his specific work: Matt Murdock as a man whose Catholic guilt and personal violence are the same structure approached from two directions. D’Onofrio is doing his specific work: Fisk as a man whose public-political ambitions are an extension of his personal need for structural control, and whose self-awareness about the need is the character’s most unsettling feature. Together, they are the show.

The Karen and Foggy problem

The show’s handling of Deborah Ann Woll’s Karen Page and Elden Henson’s Foggy Nelson is the adaptation’s most painful element. The first episode, without going into specific detail, delivers a plot development that removes one of them from the main action for structural reasons. The choice was controversial with fans of the Netflix show, and I share the concern. The Matt-Foggy-Karen trio was the emotional anchor of the Netflix series. Shrinking that anchor to solo-Matt status removes something the show needed.

Woll’s return to the character, for a handful of scenes across the back half, is the best acting in the show. Woll has always been the Netflix-era show’s most underrated element, and her screen time here, though limited, reminds us what the trio could have carried if the show had chosen to carry it.

The Bernthal question

Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle appears in a single episode, structurally at the show’s midpoint, and the episode functions as a loose backdoor pilot for a rumoured Punisher special. Bernthal is, as ever, excellent. The specific political anxieties of the Castle character, particularly around specific real-world misuse of Punisher iconography, are addressed in the episode in dialogue that Scardapane has said was written in close collaboration with Bernthal.

The episode is the best stand-alone hour of the season. It is also slightly adrift from the main plot, which is the cost of its guest-star structure. A more integrated Castle subplot would have served the show better. This is a Season 2 opportunity.

The New York the show builds

What Scardapane’s version of the show does best is the specific texture of its New York. This is Hell’s Kitchen. The lighting is specific. The street-level staging is specific. The supporting cast (including the returning Ayelet Zurer as Vanessa Fisk and the welcome new cast member Margarita Levieva, who plays a specific political-journalist character I will not fully detail) is the kind of specific ensemble the show needs to read as a genuine urban drama rather than as a superhero show set in generic-city.

The action, when the show commits to it, is staged at the specific physical register the Netflix-era show established. The corridor-fight tradition is honoured. The second-episode one-shot action sequence through a parking structure, directed by Benson and Moorhead, is the show’s best single action beat and one of the best one-shot action sequences American superhero TV has produced.

What the show argues

Daredevil: Born Again is, at its structural core, an argument about continuity: specifically, an argument that the Netflix-era Marvel shows were a specific television achievement that mainstream Marvel TV had, for six years, systematically refused to continue from. The show’s decision, after its mid-production overhaul, to effectively admit this argument is the show’s biggest concession and its biggest asset.

The other thing the show argues, more quietly, is that American superhero television does not have to be generic. The Netflix-era Daredevil was specific because specific creative people (Drew Goddard, Steven DeKnight, Erik Oleson) were allowed to commit to a specific genre register. Born Again, after its reset, is specific again because Scardapane was allowed the same commitment. When Marvel television produces committed work, it works. When it hedges, it does not. This is not a complicated lesson.

What the season leaves

A second season is filming. Scardapane is continuing. D’Onofrio and Cox have signed on. The specific overhaul that produced the released version of the first season has, to Marvel’s credit, produced a template the studio seems willing to extend.

Watch the back half of Season 1 twice. Pay attention to the meeting scene in episode eight. The show’s argument is made there, and the argument is good enough that the first half of the season, which is less committed, becomes easier to forgive in retrospect.