Born Again’ Is the Best Marvel Disney+ Series So Far

Marvel’s new Daredevil television series is called Born Again. While the show borrows little material from the “Born Again” Daredevil comics by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli, it turns out to be a fitting subtitle anyway. The show not only revives Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio’s fan-favorite versions of Daredevil and the Kingpin from the earlier Netflix TV show, its production was paused and then restarted, after Marvel was reportedly dissatisfied with the results of the first handful of episodes. The studio shifted the series’ overall direction and replaced Born Again’s original showrunner and directors.

Despite the rocky development, the results speak for themselves. I don’t know if I would say my enthusiasm for Marvel TV is, ahem, reborn based solely on this one show. But I am confident that I’ve enjoyed the five Daredevil: Born Again episodes I’ve watched so far more than any other Marvel series on Disney+, and that includes popular titles like WandaVision and Loki. 

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If you’re expecting something based on Miller and Mazzucchelli’s storyline about the Kingpin systematically destroying Daredevil’s life (followed by Daredevil’s gradual recovery and triumph over his arch-foe), you can forget about that right now. In fact, Netflix’s Daredevil already adapted some of Marvel Comics’ “Born Again” in its third and final season.

Through its first five episodes, the Born Again Disney+ series is far more indebted to recent sources, including Daredevil stories by Charles Soule where the Kingpin becomes the Mayor of New York City, and “The Trial of the Century” storyline from writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Alex Maleev in which Daredevil’s alter ego, defense lawyer Matt Murdock, defends another vigilante, the White Tiger, after he is wrongfully accused of murder.

Early episodes of Born Again follow Murdock (Cox) as he seeks evidence that would exonerate White Tiger (Kamar de los Reyes). Meanwhile, former Kingpin of Crime Wilson Fisk (D’Onofrio) runs for mayor of New York while he obsesses over the fate of masked vigilantes like Daredevil and White Tiger.

According to numerous online reports, Daredevil: Born Again was originally intended as more of an unofficial reboot of the property, with Cox and D’Onofrio as the only returning cast members from Netflix’s Daredevil. The version of the show that finally wound up on Disney+ brought back several more familiar faces, including Deborah Ann Woll’s Karen Page, Elden Henson’s Foggy Nelson, Wilson Bethel’s Bullseye, Ayelet Zurer’s Vanessa Fisk, and Jon Bernthal’s Punisher.

All of these characters play crucial roles in setting up Born Again’s A plot, and firmly establish it as a continuation of the earlier series. That said, even if you never watched the Netflix Daredevil, you won’t be lost. I never finished Daredevil Season 2, and I never even started Season 3 and I never felt the slightest bit confused about what was happening in Born Again. Equally important, I never felt like I was joining a show in its fourth season. (Kudos to series creators Dario Scardapane and Matt Corman and Chris Ord for producing something that feels connected to what’s come before, but not beholden to it.)

After an extremely elaborate fight sequence in the premiere episode, Born Again slows down and narrows its scope, burrowing into the minds and struggles of its two leads. But the relatively limited amount of action never bothered me because the show’s characters and the stories are so good. Daredevil: Born Again doesn’t feel like a tangential footnote to some larger overarching mega-narrative about the MCU; it plays like a real TV show, one with an overarching season-long storyline alongside shorter episodic ones, plus a deep bench of valuable supporting players like Matt Murdock’s worldweary investigator pal Cherry (Clark Johnson) and Wilson Fisk’s scheming protégé Daniel (Michael Gandolfini — clever casting for a movie about a mob boss with a heap of domestic issues).

Although Matt Murdock has largely sworn off costumed adventuring for much of the early part of this season, Born Again also digs into the moral dilemmas faced by a character who fights for justice in a court of law and then takes the law into his own hands by donning a red mask and body armor and punching bad dudes repeatedly in the face and neck. White Tiger’s trial is a great venue to explore some of those ideas, and the story takes several juicy twists and turns along the way — even if you have read the comics those episodes are based on.

The early episodes of the series also feature something sorely lacking from a lot of other Marvel shows (and a lot of modern prestige shows in general): Genuine cliffhangers. When each episode cut to black, I was excited to start the next one. That’s a feeling the MCU hasn’t given me in a while. Given the long and precarious route Daredevil: Born Again took the screen, it’s also a borderline miraculous one.

The first two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again are available now on Disney+. The remaining seven episodes in Season 1 will debut weekly on the service. 

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