4: Marvel’s Daredevil by Dylan Brandsema

It’d be a sin to look back on the best television shows of 2015 and not mention Marvel’s incomparable Daredevil. The first of many still-to-come collaborations between Marvel and Netflix, Daredevil encompassed everything a superhero series should and could be.

Daredevil understood that crafting a great superhero stories involves a lot more than end-of-the-world plots and bombastic action sequences. It had characters. Heart. Meaning. Depth. It used its setting – Hell’s Kitchen – to paint us a picture of this character’s life, that character of course being Matt Murdock. Unlike most of the live-action superhero treatments we’ve gotten from the Big 2 (keep in mind I said most, not all), Daredevil put us in the hero’s shoes and gave us a glimpse of what it would really be like to be a blind vigilante in a crime-ridden city, in all of its gritty dark glory.

And Daredevil was dark and gritty indeed, but not without reason. The shadowy cinematography and darkly colored visuals are complemented brilliantly by top-notch writing and directing led by showrunner Steven DeKnight. There’s absolutely spectacular acting from everyone in the cast including Daredevil himself Charlie Cox, Deborah Ann Woll, Endel Henson, but most noticeably the transcendent Vincent D’Onofrio as the troubled monster businessman Wilson Fisk (Otherwise referred to in comicdom as “Kingpin”). D’Onofrio’s performance as the Kingpin was truly to the yin to Murdock’s yang – the perfect antagonist – filling every scene he’s in with a sense of overwhelming dread and unease. If nothing else, Daredevil was worth watching for D’Onofrio’s performance alone, and it is an absolute shame he hasn’t recognized by the awards circuit for his crowning achievement

Above all, Daredevil also showed us that a superhero story doesn’t just have to be about superheroes. While it is first and foremost about a protagonist with superhuman abilities, it was also about character relationships. How would being a blind crimefighter affect your professional career and personal life, and how can this kind of character exploration be applied to the superhero good-guy-vs-bad-guy formula? Here is a show that isn’t afraid to exist in a comic-book driven Hollywood, as well as within in a connecting superhero universe (the MCU), and pride itself on writing and story instead of how many buildings it can collapse in the same frame and how many references it can make to the other adaptions. It’s a multi-layered crime drama, a police procedural, and a superhero origin story.

It was exciting, no-nonsense comic book entertainment of the highest caliber and likely Marvel’s best live action adaption to date. Everything we could have asked for and more. Future TV superhero shows should take notes.  

[php] wp_link_pages(array(‘before’=>’

‘)); [/php]

=========================================================================================================