2015 feels so long ago, both superhero-wise and everything else–wise, that it’s easy to forget how good the first season of Marvel and Netflix’s Daredevil was. It was certainly no one’s masterpiece, but it was smart, dark, violently grimy, and boasted a surprising number of top-shelf acting performances, particularly from Charlie Cox, who played the title hero, and Vincent D’Onofrio, whose turn as megavillain Wilson Fisk remains one of the best heel performances in the whole Marevel Cinematic Universe. No other Marvel project, before or since, so transparently bore the influence of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy, in mostly good ways; in hindsight, it feels like one of the last things the MCU attempted that felt genuinely adventurous. The show’s second season was something of a mess, both overstuffed and undercooked; its third season righted the ship a bit, but by that point Marvel was already shutting off the lights on its Netflix partnership, and Daredevil was unceremoniously canceled in 2018.
Now Daredevil is back, this time on Disney+, in the fittingly if also confusingly titled series Daredevil: Born Again. (“Born Again” is a nod to the 1986 Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli Daredevil story arc, one of the most famous runs in Marvel comics history, although the show’s plot is mostly unrelated to those books.) Cox is back as Murdock, D’Onofrio back as Fisk, and a number of other characters return from the original Netflix series as well, some in extensive roles, some less so.
As a Marvel-obsessed child, my favorite character was always Daredevil. First debuting back in 1964, Daredevil is the red-clad alter ego of Matthew Murdock, a brilliant lawyer who suffered a childhood accident that cost him his sight while raising his other senses to superhuman extremes. Daredevil/Murdock is also a devout if frequently tormented Catholic, as well as a martial arts expert. If this all sounds a little ridiculous, trust me that a disabled but secretly superpowered guilt-ridden Catholic ninja is the sort of exquisitely overwrought fake-deep bullshit that lends itself to great pulp storytelling for 10-year-olds. Daredevil is, simply put and in every sense, a fantastic superhero. (It’s no coincidence that the comic reached its apex in the hands of Miller, whose work has always gravitated toward messianic self-seriousness.)
Daredevil: Born Again isn’t terrible, and has moments of actually being pretty good. The acting performances are once again strong, and it’s refreshing that Marvel chose not to recast bigger names in any of the main roles. (It was also probably cost-effective.) Some of the fight sequences are pretty cool, and visually the show mostly avoids the egregious CGI dreck that usually plagues superhero media.
But the show also bears too many of the troublesome qualities that have bedeviled MCU films and shows in recent years. The production was notoriously protracted, first entering development in 2022 and then undergoing a comprehensive overhaul in the middle of shooting in 2023, with Marvel firing the show’s core writing and directing team, many of whom are still credited on the series. The result is a stitched-together Frankenstein’s monster whose seams are too often a little too visible. Without spoiling too much, the first part of Born Again (the show will be 17 episodes in total, the first nine of which will be released this year, with the final eight to come in 2026) finds Murdock navigating the aftershocks of a personal tragedy while Fisk, who has seemingly discarded his past as the terrifying underworld boss known as Kingpin, successfully pursues a run for mayor of New York City.
This is a solid if somewhat thin premise for what will effectively be two full seasons of television. Born Again compensates for this with an inadvisable number of subplots, including ones involving a gruesome serial killer, a bank heist, and a prison break, to name just a few. Many of these storylines unfold awkwardly and occasionally nonsensically, qualities that betray the too-many-cooks nature of the revival’s construction. (There were multiple times that I found myself rewinding to see if I had somehow missed a scene that explained whatever I was watching.) Characters, storylines, and themes are introduced suddenly and then just as abruptly abandoned, or clumsily reintroduced several episodes later.
The result is a show that’s fitfully stylish and broadly watchable while never totally coherent. That last quality is evident even in its title, with “Born Again” a referential Easter egg for comic fans who will then be disappointed that the show has nothing to do with the comics being referenced. “Why not just call it something else?” is a perfectly reasonable question that I doubt was ever asked. The show is similarly torn between its desire to perform fan service for devotees of the original 2015 series, as evidenced in the litany of guest cameos and other callbacks to the Netflix run, and its obligations to retrofit that show’s revival into the broader world of Marvel’s current Disney+ offerings.
It’s this quality, caught between eras of Marvel’s television ambitions, that is Born Again’s most flummoxing and perhaps irresolvable problem. The Netflix era of Marvel had its high points but was ultimately something of a failure. The plan hatched in the early 2010s was to introduce the characters of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist by giving each of them their own series, which would be successively intertwined until culminating as The Defenders, basically a streaming-TV version of what Marvel’s film division had pulled off so successfully with The Avengers. The shows were also meant to be a more adult departure from the family-friendly movies: These characters swore, they bled, and they killed people; they even had sex. But after some strong starts the shows began rapidly declining in quality, bottoming out with the nearly unwatchable Iron Fist in 2017. By the time The Defenders miniseries finally premiered later that year, many viewers had simply stopped caring, and Marvel and Netflix pulled the plug on their collaboration shortly thereafter.
When Marvel restarted its television outfit at Disney+ with WandaVision in 2021, the tone was dramatically different: The Disney+ MCU shows were bright and colorful, infused with the sort of winking goofiness that had helped make the film division both so lucrative and at times so grating. Daredevil: Born Again dutifully makes its crossover gestures to its Disney+ siblings like Ms. Marvel and Hawkeye, but these are moments when the show simply stops working. Born Again’s dual mandate of preserving the gritty darkness of the original Daredevil series while also fitting into the rest of the streaming MCU as currently imagined simply isn’t a feasible proposition.
All of this is a shame, because Daredevil is a former Marvel A-lister who deserves much better than where he’s landed in 2025. Marvel clearly knows they’ve had a potential star languishing on their bench, and while Born Again is a valiant attempt to get him back in the game, its approach seems to misunderstand the character’s own strength. Back in 2015, Daredevil had both the good sense and the freedom to just be a show about Daredevil. Born Again is a show about Daredevil that also has to be about everyone and everything else, and as things have tended to go in the MCU as of late, therein lies the problem.
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