Daredevil: Born Again was once a very different beast. The revived series was originally conceived by Kevin Feige and co. as a legal procedural for Disney+ following its three-season Netflix run, using their already popular Marvel lawyer to go in a different direction than the gritty show fans were familiar with.
But Law & Order with Matt Murdock didn’t work out, and midway through production, Born Again was overhauled to better align with the Daredevil that had come before.
On the Happy Sad Confused podcast this month, Born Again star Charlie Cox reflected on both the show’s retooling and original focus, telling host Josh Horowitz that people love procedurals because “they’re incredibly addictive; they’re really easy to watch; they’re very, very well written,” but added, “It’s very difficult to write a well-written procedural.”
He also noted that there had been an “admirable effort” to change up Daredevil for the Disney+ era, but that “Once we got into production, it very quickly became apparent that the lessons we’d learnt from the [Ben Affleck] movie that we had got right in the show, we were now almost unlearning a little bit, and that the character really does work best in a serialized platform, but also when it’s darker and grittier and there’s less tongue-in-cheek levity.”
