REVIEW: Daredevil: Born Again – Season One

Rating: TV-MA | Episodes: 9 | Runtime: 60 minutes
Release Date: March 4th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Marvel Studios / Disney+
Creator(s): Matt Corman & Chris Ord and Dario Scardapane / Bill Everett & Stan Lee (character)

We’re babysitting chaos.

The creation of Disney+ ultimately killed Netflix’s “Defenders.” There was no way an MCU offshoot (which made mention of events and characters from the film without ever overtly stating details or names) could co-exist with whatever Marvel Studios had planned on their own platform. So, they shut it down before a fourth season of “Daredevil” could advance past the planning stage (cast members were under the impression they would see its five-season arc to fruition). The studio focused on shows featuring their cinematic superheroes instead while waiting the contractually obligated two years before reinserting Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock and Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk to the fold.

Fan excitement at seeing them back was palpable, so Kevin Feige knew the potential to give them more than just cameos a la “Hawkeye” and “She-Hulk” was real. Matt Corman and Chris Ord were soon enlisted to steward this new direction via a planned eighteen-episode season that saw Matt retired from the mask and focusing on his new law practice with Kirsten Mcduffie (Nikki M. James). Mention of previous seasons was minimal, the tone was softened, and all involved sought to move forward as though the Netflix iteration didn’t exist on Earth-616 after all. Well, despite shooting six episodes, Cox and D’Onofrio approached Feige to admit it wasn’t working. He agreed.

So, if the first season of “Daredevil: Born Again” feels weird, it’s because its creation was anything but smooth. Corman and Ord were let go (although they rightfully retain creator credit—think Frank Darabont with “The Walking Dead”) and replaced by “The Punisher” writer Dario Scardapane. The choice to bring back Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), and Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal apparently was asked to rejoin earlier, but felt the direction they wanted to go with the character did a disservice to his previous work) was made. And “Moon Knight” and “Loki” directors Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson came aboard to direct a new pilot, penultimate episode, and finale. New footage was also filmed to provide cohesion throughout those original six chapters and this Big Apple-set Frankenstein’s monster was born.

I’ll say it up front: those new Benson and Moorhead episodes are a completely different beast than the rest. Yes, that’s the whole point, but being able to tell puts a damper on things since we’re truly just wondering when we’ll get back to those stakes again. It’s night and day. Daredevil and Matt Murdock. He may don the suit now and then, but he’s desperately trying to hold the darkness at bay while doing what he can with suit and tie. It works in isolation (I loved the lighter bottle episode opposite Mohan Kapur’s Yusuf Khan entitled “With Interest”) and when it helps infer upon his internal struggle (representing the late Kamar de los Reyes’ Hector Ayala on a case that hits close to home), but the rest is, for lack of a better term, pedestrian.

Muse (Hunter Doohan) never feels like more than a means to an end as a villain injected by brute force rather than sprinkled in with nuance. Neither does Dr. Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva) as a love interest who’s truly just a pawn to keep Matt and Fisk tangentially connected while their actual plot progressions are miles apart. I like the mirror of those two adversaries fighting to shake off their masks (Daredevil and Kingpin pushing through the façade of lawyer and mayor, respectively) on paper, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired since we know it’s a false battle. Matt will always be Daredevil. He must to survive. And, despite what occurs at the end of “Echo” between Fisk and Maya (Alaqua Cox)—left unexplained and forgotten (at worst) or used to prove monsters are byproducts of nature rather than nurture (at best), Wilson is a gangster.

We’re ultimately spinning wheels until Wilson Bethel’s Bullseye returns to the screen. He’s who Scardapane uses to connect us to the past and add intrigue for the present. He becomes the reason Matt puts the mask away and why Daredevil can no longer sit idly by as Wilson and Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer) remake the city’s governmental infrastructure in their corrupt image. We tread water through six episodes of exposition that’s wholly unnecessary to anyone who watched the original series as far as explaining Matt’s Catholic guilt, and hope the payoff is worth the wait. Kapur and de los Reyes are great and both James and Levieva serve their purpose as a two-pronged Foggy and Karen stand-in (for all the talk about “bringing them back,” Woll and Henson receive about twenty minutes of screen-time total), but it’s Clark Johnson’s PI Cherry who stood out most.

Arty Froushan’s Buck Cashman, a budget-James Wesley, proves yet again how integral Toby Leonard Moore was to that first “Daredevil” season. Genneya Walton is an interesting addition as Ben Urich’s niece BB, serving in much the same role. And Michael Gandolfini is fun as the new youngster for Fisk to take under his political wing while Zabryna Guevara and Michael Gaston look on in horror. Think J.D. Vance as lapdog to Trump while the Liz Cheneys and Charles Schumers of the world still pretend like the actual rule of law exists rather than the my-way-or-the-highway “rule of law” that has replaced it. I don’t think the allusions Scardapane makes in the final two episodes of Fisk doing to New York City what Trump has done to America will be lost on anyone.

As for the payoff: I won’t deny that those last two chapters deliver more of what I hoped the show would. Is it enough to save what comes before it? Not in any real sense. We can only cross our fingers that it will be enough to save what comes next since the planned eight-episode season two arrives with a blank canvas. Scardapane and, presumably, Moorhead and Benson have the reins now to build off what they turned season one into instead of being hamstrung to work with what was already shot and too expensive to scrap altogether. If they can give us something to truly invest in, it will all have been worth the trouble. Because I love seeing Cox, D’Onofrio, and Bernthal back in costume. It would just be so much better if they had something interesting and unique to do.

Tidbits:

Letting the cracked stones have sound effects that overpower the score during the opening credits is a distracting move that undermines what should be a powerfully dramatic sensory experience.
The logotype looks like the show is going to be a sitcom in the vein of “Frasier”—an insane choice, but perhaps more aligned with what the original vision would have been.
As someone who lived through the 80s and is on home movies singing Jefferson Starship’s “We Built This City” with his sister as children, the choice of using that song as a gag in 2025 like it’s relevant was wild. Unless it became a meme recently and I didn’t know.
Great to see Lou Taylor Pucci, albeit in a very small role. The fact that he was the star in Moorhead and Benson’s masterpiece Spring makes me believe his part was added by Scardapane to connect Vanessa to their new episodes.