News came out late last week that Disney+ was moving forward with a new Daredevil television show, with Matt Corman and Chris Ord tapped to write and produce. While there has been no word as of this writing if Charlie Cox will reprise his role as Matt Murdock/Daredevil or Vincent D’Onofrio will return as Wilson Fisk, they have both made recent appearances in the MCU in Spider-man: No Way Home and Hawkeye, respectively.
With the return of Daredevil to television there will certainly be questions if the gritty style that made the Netflix show so popular among comic and non-comic fans alike will translate to the more family friendly Disney+. While these fears are justified, it is important to note that while the show was at times hyper-violent and tonally geared towards adults, it was the realistic portrayal of Daredevil that truly gave the show its credibility.
The Netflix run of Daredevil portrayed Matt Murdock as a vigilante who was trying his best to clean up New York, one criminal and one borough at a time. Cox’s Murdock was not just a good man trying to make a difference, but in many ways a tortured soul who was trying not to get lost in the darkness of his heroic task. Murdock’s attempts to rid crime from the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York was juxtaposed with the weight of every action to do so.
In many ways the series' focus was how far is too far, when it comes to justice?
For many, Daredevil will be looked at the most honest portrayal of a superhero on television. There is nothing fancy about the show, and ever stylized decision adds to the realism the show was respected for. The show was known for keeping everything at a very street level. There was a focus on a darker color palette and the cinematography made the city look like it was always a threat to its inhabitants.
These purposeful decisions, the playing around with dark colors, shades of gray if you will, signify that every decision that Daredevil must make is one that could go either way when it comes to the battle between right and wrong. This humanizing factor found in the character, challenges the audience to see the consequences for every move Daredevil makes.
One of the lasting legacies of the series was the action and focus on intense hand-to-hand combat. Throughout each season of the show, but especially in Season 1, Matt Murdock is a beaten man. Every punch and kick he throws is done with an intense vigor to demonstrate just how precarious his position was. While his senses are extremely heightened, and he is trained by a master in Stick (Scott Glen), Murdock does not come across as an all-powerful hero, ready to save the world from an alien invasion. He is beaten up and almost killed throughout the first season and the famous one -take hallway scene demonstrates the realism the show was going for. The characters in the scene are filmed as black figures moving through a dazed yellow light, and when he is isolated, Murdock is out of breath and tired. He is literally fighting for his life in the scene, and it is symbolic of the battle he is fighting in his head.
To further exemplify this, we need to focus on the basic core of who Matt Murdock is, and how he was represented in the television show. Murdock’s attempts to balance the scales of justice starts with his day job as a lawyer. As he and friend Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) start a pro bono law firm with the clear intent to help people who are in need. As Murdock slips more and more into the darkness of the Daredevil persona, he becomes challenged by the definition of what helping really means. Taking the law into his own hands is the exact opposite of what a lawyer believes in, but he does so anyway because his own personal code of justice becomes the most important thing in his life.
As the series reaches its crescendo, Murdock realizes that to eradicate the crime in the city he is going to have to chop the snakes head off and deal directly with Wilson Fisk. To justify his thoughts and actions, Murdock often leans on his Catholicism, both as a support and crutch. When he seeks a priest’s guidance about the Fisk problem, the priest replies, “The question you have to ask yourself is: are you struggling with the fact that you don’t want to kill this man, but have to, or that you don’t have to kill him, but want to?”
This question is at the very fabric of the Matt Murdock character. Daredevil resonates with fans because he is a real person having to make difficult decisions. These decisions weigh on him like they would weigh on us.
We become attached to Matt Murdock because we understand the struggle he is going through. At the end of the day, he is just a person trying to do more good in the world than bad, but when those lines start to blur he becomes the most vulnerable and most relatable character in the MCU.