Daredevil on Netflix

Marvel Studios has been a powerhouse, creating blockbuster movies that are basically guaranteed successes (for now at least,) which I think is due to a combination of having a fun "house style" and also the way that the interconnectedness of the various movies invites one to try to keep up with all of them - even though Thor, Iron Man, or my favorite outside of the Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America, have their own adventures, they're all linked somewhat.

When Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. launched, I was hopeful - mainly as a fan of previous Joss Whedon shows - but I ultimately lost interest pretty quickly, as it didn't have the spectacle that the films have, and very little to make up for that deficiency. I'm told it gets better, but I haven't had the stomach to give it another chance just yet.

Out of curiosity, I decided to take a look at Daredevil on the recommendation of a friend (though given that this is a friend who is an avowed comics nerd/walking comics encyclopedia, I know he has a pretty big positive response bias toward anything superhero-related, which I don't think I do.)

What's interesting is how much smaller-scale Daredevil is. Naturally, as a tv-show (well, a Netflix show) there can't be massive battles against CGI aliens all the time, but also, the tone of the show pulls it much farther down to street-level. Tony Stark is a globe-trotting billionaire with a huge corporation under his control, Captain America is a walking national treasure, and Thor is a freaking god (well, technically a trans-dimensional alien, but close enough,) and so their stories basically go big or go home. Matt Murdock does have a legitimate superpower in the form of his heightened senses, as well as some serious martial arts training, but he operates on the level of a single district in Manhattan.

Seven episodes into the thirteen-episode season, the mythos of Daredevil is only just starting to expand into the more exotic stuff one finds in superhero comics. Matt is just a good guy who wants to see his neighborhood improve, and the fact that this is technically the same universe where Dark Elves are crashing into London and there's a secret Nazi plot to use drone warfare to destroy freedom throughout the world doesn't really bleed into the story that much. One gets the impression that this isn't so much because there's a strict barrier between these stories as much as the fact that, despite all this insanity, there are still cities full of people with criminals and corruption and innocent people getting caught in the crossfire through no fault of their own.

Actually, the larger mythos of the Marvel universe does actually provide one helpful thing for the show's narrative. If you've been to Manhattan basically since the mid-90s, you know that the whole island pretty much went through massive gentrification, including Hell's Kitchen. So while crime is certainly not non-existent there, it's not the seedy urban dystopia of Taxi Driver or the Warriors.

But one of the biggest events of the MCU was the "Battle of New York" - the massive invasion by the Chitauri that was stopped by the Avengers in the first crossover film. While the Avengers themselves picked up and got some shawarma afterward, the fact is that the city is struggling to recover.

And that's how the show's primary antagonist enters the scene. Wilson Fisk, who has yet to be referred to by his supervillain name Kingpin (Matt has yet to be called Daredevil, and doesn't even have the iconic red suit,) actually earnestly thinks that he's helping to rebuild the city. The only problem is that he's doing so in a way that establishes various criminal elite as an integral part of that structure.

For the first several episodes, then, Daredevil feels more like a fairly grounded crime show, that just features a hero who puts on a mask (good thing he doesn't need to use his eyes) and does what he can to upset the villains' plans through the judicious application of fisticuffs. And while Matt's a total badass (and the fight choreography is fantastic, especially the single-take fight scene at the end of episode two,) Kingpin's done so much legwork that it's difficult to see how our hero is going to take him down (for one thing, while not all cops are under Kingpin's employ, it seems like the ones who are outnumber those who aren't by about four to one.)

Notably, however, at episode seven (the halfway point,) we start to get more of Daredevil's backstory, and some of the more exotic elements (namely ninjas.) Actually, this has all reminded me of the fact that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were originally created as a parody of "dark, edgy" superhero comics, particularly Daredevil during Frank Miller's run. The show actually eschews the typical origin story stuff, at least at first, but we are eventually introduced to Murdock's mentor "Stick," (Splinter's antecedent) and we've started to get hints of a larger ninja organization that I believe is called "The Hand," (and is correspondingly the antecedent for the Foot Clan - sorry, I'm a guy who was born in the mid-80s, so the Ninja Turtles were an obsession of my childhood.)

I'm just over halfway through the season, but I'm still rather captivated at how different this show is in tone than other Marvel adaptations have been. It's much darker, definitely more violent (and even downright gory at times,) and helpfully winds back the stakes so that the fate of the world doesn't have to hang in the balance for us to care about what our hero is doing. Daredevil isn't even trying to protect all of New York, or even all of Manhattan, but by showing the high stakes of saving a kid from a gang of kidnappers, it actually helps put the "world in peril" stories that the other superheroes have to deal with in context.

Anyway, I'll probably have my reactions when I finish the season, but for now, I'd say check it out if you want to see a different side of Marvel Studios.