Marvel’s Daredevil lands on Netflix at midnight tonight, and this take on The Man Without Fear will surely make a bigger impact than the Ben Affleck movie did.
Charlie Cox plays Matt Murdock (aka Daredevil) and the cast is populated with a talented ensemble including Rosario Dawson and Vincent D’Onofrio. As a concept, Daredevil was perfect to be the inaugural launch in the series of five Netflix shows based on Marvel properties.
“Daredevil warrants that kind of storytelling, and Marvel starts with story,” Marvel’s Head of Television Jeph Loeb told us last week in a press roundtable for the show. Telling the story on Netflix in 13 episodes, in his opinion, was perfect for telling the story of a rise of a hero and the rise of a criminal empire. “We always set out to do a crime drama first, and a superhero story second,” he explained.
“It’s how to find the best way to tell the best story, and in this particular case, it was on Netflix in 13 hours that had a real feeling to it,” Loeb continued, also pointing out that the show’s locale is also a big influence. “At the end of the day, Daredevil takes place in Hell’s Kitchen, and we wanted to make sure that it felt very much like New York City, and it was a different kind of New York City than we saw in the world of Tony Stark and the world of the Avengers. Just starting out from the very beginning, we always saw that the Avengers were here to save the universe, and that the street-level heroes as we like to call them are here to save the neighborhood. And in order to make that work, we had to see the neighborhood, believe the neighborhood, and get to know what was going on,” he explained, before talking about movie influences that they had in going into this show – influences that also influenced Frank Miller and Brian Michael Bendis when creating the comics.
Executive Producer Steven S. DeKnight also praised the Miller and Bendis runs when talking about his influences. “While we didn’t pick any specific storyline from any of the runs on Daredevil, we definitely were spiritually influenced – me, especially, largely by Frank Miller and Brian Michael Bendis’ run with Alex Maleev,” he explained. “Alex Maleev’s art we were also very much influenced by. We said ‘that’s the look of the show.’ I mean, that really captures it.”
“For us, it all came down to character,” DeKnight continued. “With 13 hours, what we have is the luxury of time. If we were doing a movie, we would see Wilson Fisk in the first 10 minutes, but because we have 13 hours to play with, you don’t see him until the end of Episode 3. And again, even if we were on a network, you would see a lot more Wilson Fisk in that first episode, but because we are with Netflix, they really support long-form storytelling, where we can let the story breathe. I really loved working on this, because we never felt like we had to burn through a bunch of story. We never felt like we had to have, like, three action set pieces per episode to keep people interested. We just really allowed it to breathe and live the way it wanted to live.”
KSiteTV Editor-In-Chief Craig Byrne has been writing about TV on the internet since 1995. He is also the author of several published books, including Smallville: The Visual Guide and the show's Official Companions for Seasons 4-7.
