Disney’s ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ Series Premiere Waters Down Hero’s Faith And Themes
(REVIEW) “Daredevil: Born Again” has had a winding road to the small screen. The popular Netflix series that ran from 2015 to 2018 went through a complete overhaul that replaced the whole creative team and brought back original cast and characters. While fans were happy it looked like the new version would be closer to the original, trepidation still persisted in many quarters given Marvel’s recently disappointing track record in both film and TV.
“Daredevil: Born Again” picks up years after the original show ended and then a year after blind lawyer Matt Murdock stopped his activities as the masked vigilante “Daredevil” following a tragic incident. Murdock continues his fight for justice as a lawyer, while former crime boss Wilson Fisk is elected mayor of New York City, putting the pair on a collision course.
Some of the magic is definitely back. Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio slip seamlessly back into their old roles as Daredevil and Kingpin, respectively, effortlessly balancing the affable exteriors with the underlying rage that exemplifies both characters. Deborah Ann Woll never misses a beat in her deeply layered and enchanting portrayal of Karen Page.
Many of the action scenes are exactly as stylized and brutal as we remember. And some of the use of Murdock’s super-senses is even better than I remember from the original. The first use of Matt’s radar sense in the show actually changes aspect ratio to signal without words that he’s changing his focus. The opening scene before the title sequence and the Murdock-Fisk diner scene are easily the best in the premiere.
At the same time, some things feel oddly amateurish. The opening “one shot” fight scene starts abruptly, skipping over any moment that focuses on Matt’s emotional reaction to the shocking thing that motivated it. Characters and plot points are rushed through and told to us rather than developed and shown. Matt overhearing conversations, watching TV and clips of BB Urich’s news show are all used to toss out rapid-fire exposition before immediately moving on to the next plot point. We are told that vigilantes are running rampant around New York, but we never see them except in one teeny security camera footage. Matt and his new love interest, Heather, get their scene cut to montage before they start getting to know each other, and then in the next scene, they’re just already a couple.
Some of this is clearly due to the show’s awkward production and reshoots trying to make a whole show out of its disparate parts. Honestly, given that, it’s amazing it works so well (it certainly works a lot better than “Captain America: Brave New World” which had similar problems). But it’s not hard to see where some of the seams are where a new show was stitched together out of the old.
Because Karen and Foggy were not originally set to return, everything that has them is a reshoot. That makes it easier to see how the show was originally a pretty underwhelming crime procedural with quirky characters and banter before they added the Netflix pathos and angst. It does cultivate more optimism that the good stuff in the show will only be more prevalent in the second season — particularly because Karen and Foggy are already set to return (although this definitely raises questions for one of those characters, specifically).
The biggest problem with the premiere is its lack of theme. The original show had all the characters struggling with issues that were bigger than the events themselves. What does it mean to be a hero? How do you wrestle with your good and bad sides? The new show has Wilson Fisk saying he’s going to outlaw vigilantes, but none of the characters wrestle with the merits of this proposal, nor connect it in a meaningful way to the characters’ own journeys.
Unfortunately, this may be by design. The showrunner noted recently what he liked and disliked about the original show he was taking over: “The earlier show, at its best, was fantastic. At its worst, it was two characters in a room talking about what a hero is. I felt that had been done. I’m not taking swipes. I just didn’t want to hear characters grousing about their lot in life. I wanted to see them doing things.”
Wanting to keep things moving makes sense. That mindset also misses what made the original show great. What truly made “Daredevil” so much better than most superhero show was that it took its time between action scenes to really sit with what the action scenes meant. Because these scenes unpacked the themes of the show so we could understand how a guy in tights beating up crooks was also about us. But it wasn’t just about us — but the deepest part of ourselves and the questions we ask about the world we live in.
It would have been incredibly easy as well to connect larger themes to the story they’re trying to tell. The tragedy Daredevil experiences at the beginning of the series could easily give Matt reason to sympathize with Fisk’s goals, even as he doesn’t trust his motive for enacting it. It could naturally lead to nuanced debates with other heroes Matt encounters who still believe in crime fighting the way he once did. Instead, we just rush from one plot point to the next. The original show felt like a four-course meal; this one feels like McDonald’s. And because this is the person hired to remake the show, it is the one thing that makes me feel trepidation about further storylines.
This gets to a related problem: burying and downplaying Matt Murdock’s Catholic faith. It’s hard to overstate just how important Daredevil’s Catholicism was to the character in the original series. The first episode of the original series opens with Matt confessing to a priest. That priest is a mentor whom Matt repeatedly goes to throughout the series for counsel about his sins and explicit theological questions, like the existence of the devil. Matt’s faith is overly credited with his desire to not kill people so everyone gets a shot at redemption. The entire third season is Daredevil wrestling explicitly with the question of why God allows evil. I’ve often told people that the original Netflix Daredevil show was the best faith-based series ever made.
Just look at this quote from the third season from the original show: “God's plan is like a beautiful tapestry. And the tragedy of being human is that we only get to see it from the back, with all the ragged threads and the muddy colors, we don't get a hint at the true beauty that would be revealed if we could see the whole pattern. … As God does.”
Contrast that to the closest we get in terms of faith from the two-part premiere of “Born Again”: “I was raised to believe in grace. That we can be touched by the divine and transformed into a better person. So if you say to me that you’re a new man, I say ‘fine.’ But you should know that I was also raised to believe in retribution. So if you step out of line, I’ll be there.”
These are very vague ways of talking about faith — even down with saying “the divine” rather than God. Now, it could easily be true that faith themes will become stronger as the show goes on. But given how heavy the Catholicism was in the original series premiere compared to how strong this one is, I’m skeptical, particularly since the show seems allergic to themes. Wrestling with the balance between grace and retribution would be a fascinating idea to explore. But given the show doesn’t want to wade deeply into any of its ideas, I doubt “Born Again” will address it much after this episode, if at all.
This allergy to the theme corresponding to lack of faith is something I’ve noticed before with other projects like “Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim.” I’m not ready yet to connect correlation with causation. But there’s a strong part of me that wonders if there’s a real connection. We know that one of the benefits of faith (as discussed in Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation”) is that it creates a meta-narrative around life that connects our individual lives to our highest values (so that we see our story and the story of everyone around us as one complete story).
As we abandon religion and in-person communities for virtual ones, we are slowly losing our ability to see our particular stories as part of something universal. It would be surprising if that didn’t affect the stories we tell. The “Daredevil: Born Again” premiere captures much of what made the original show great, from the characters to the action. But unlike being “born again” in Christian parlance, the show’s watering down of faith and the depth of its themes makes it unlikely that its second birth can quite live up to its first.
“Daredevil: Born Again” airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on Disney+
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.