'Daredevil: Born Again' Review: Disney Screws *Some* Courage To Sticking Place

While not "must-see TV" for general audiences, the fourth season of 'Daredevil' justifies itself nearly a decade later and is refreshingly of-the-moment.

Premiering tonight via its first two episodes on Disney+, Daredevil: Born Again is good enough. I enjoyed Daredevil when it aired on Netflix. The third season, which recognized that The Dark Knight was at least as much “about” Harvey Dent as about Batman and the Joker, stands alongside the first season of Jessica Jones as the best MCU TV of that Netflix-and-chill era. However, the show aired nearly a decade ago, a lifetime ago in pop culture terms, especially considering what’s transpired within and outside the realm of entertainment since early 2015.

Beyond my aversion to “The thing you loved is back… exactly as you remember it!” nostalgia, it cannot help but feel like another example of Disney benefiting from a significant non-Disney past-tense success. It exists in a world where the mere idea of a television episodic that uses a comic book source material to tell a relatively straightforward legal drama and crime thriller is no longer unto itself extraordinary or “enough.” That said, showrunner Dario Scardapane and lead directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead appear to have embraced the challenge by accepting it as a challenge. This continuation is a fourth season of the 2010s show, which refuses to just not replay the hits.