Watching the first episode again and I am surprised how much it picked right up from the end of Season 3 of the original show.
I never thought we’d get another season of this show or see this Daredevil again. Glad we are.
Anyone else watching?
In lieu of the State of the Union address, although it certainly feels…apropos of our current state of affairs, especially the “man on the street” commentaries.
They’ve certainly scraped off the stink of Daredevil’s pointless cameo in She-Hulk and essentially returned to form. However much Marvel is going to bugger up the rest of the MCU, this certainly seems like it has legs.
Stranger
I haven’t watched the second episode yet, but episode #1 was fantastic. Despite how long it was between season 3 and now, they’ve certainly managed to capture the feeling of the original series.
I wasn’t thrilled about that happening, but I understand it.
I’m anxiously optimistic.
I was disappointed.
I was shocked.
I hadn’t read any spoilers, so I was blown away as well. I really wish they had not done that.
I checked the plot summary for Season 3 just now and I realise that I never watched it. I think I gave up after Season 2 (I wasn’t a big fan).
Is it fun? The old Netflix Daredevil was about as fun as a Nolan Batman movie. In other words, not.
I’ve only seen one episode. I liked it a lot, but it isn’t fun like Peacemaker or something.
It’s definitely not your thing, then. If you want fun (for certain values of ‘fun’), maybe give this a whirl:
Stranger
I only watched episode one so far and I was a little disappointed.
They are not even trying to court new viewers. Literally zero exposition or catch up for people jumping into this one. This doesn’t affect me. I watched the Netflix show (at lest most of it, I think bailed on season three) but it’s bad and sloppy story telling.
The opening one take fight looked weird. There was something off about it. It looked like it was taking place in a Broadway theater on a stage and not in the real world.
The pacing was glacial. I was bored through most of it.
Charlie Cox is charming and it was nice to see him and Debra again but it was not a great begnning.
The show was originally intended to be a reboot with a more lighthearted feel, and then during a production halt due to the 2023 writers’ strike Kevin Feige saw a working product and realized it was crap, fired much of the production team, and did extensive rewrites and reshoots to overhaul the show and continue continuity with the Netflix series. That original series was quite popular (and available now on Disney+) so spending a bunch of screen time to recap previous events is really unnecessary and even counterproductive. There was sone awkward ‘continuity glue’ in the opening scenes at Josie’s, and I would agree the succeeding stairwell and rooftop fight was not quite up to the standards of the Netflix series; Cox apparently had issues with the stunt choreographers and eventually insisted on bringing back the team from the original show, so there may be some mix of ‘old’ and ‘new’ styles, but it certainly isn’t as bad as some of the other Marvel series (Hawkeye in particular had some really terrible fight choreography) and hopefully gets better as they move into the main story.
Stranger
Contained more digital cuts than I’d like to see. In season 3, they did a massive one-take that was legit. This one scene was neat, but there were a lot of moments we could see where they cut.
Sorry but continuing a story and not even making a token effort to catch people up is just bad writing. Any author or screenwriter will tell you this.
It’s also in their best interests. The feeling that following Marvel has become homework is very real and has affected their bottom line.
I do agree a light tone would have been wrong for the show. If I remember correctly the rumor was they were essentially making it a lawyer show with some superhero stuff which sounds awful. That said they may have over corrected a little. This episode felt like it had its head up its own ass in places.
I haven’t seen the second one yet and I liked the first one enough to continue but it was just a little disappointing.
Except for a brief reference in the opening scroll and Han’s oblique reference about having a price on his head, The Empire Strikes Back makes virtually no effort to ‘catch people up’ by rehashing the events of the first movie. And I’m not sure how you could even summarize the events of the first three Netflix series (or The Defenders, although I assume that is going to remain essentially unacknowledged even though I think it was one of the better Netflix Marvel shows) short of a long discussion between characters reiterating to one another things they already know in a pace-killing exposition dump. At this point, I think most viewers are either invested enough in the Marvel universe (of which the Netflix shows are essentially an isolated corner which only makes brief mentions of the rest of the MCU, and with a couple of exceptions isn’t acknowledged at all by the films) to do the ‘homework’, or it really just isn’t their thing to begin with.
I’m not a professional screenwriter but I’ve taken a couple of classes in writing and film production and studied screenwriting pretty extensively, and one of the pet peeves of good screenwriters is a script which spends an excessive amount of screen time recapping previous events, explaining things that should be evident to an attentive viewer, or pointless flashbacks that exist just to fill in backstory that the user can get pleasure in imagining for themselves rather than spend time on character development and advancing the plot. The backstory should just be provided organically and in piecemeal fashion unless there is some crucial plot requirement that the viewer needs to see a critical event.
As an example, imagine the cantina scene in Star Wars where Han Solo is boasting about having make the Kessel Run in under twelve parsecs, and then going into flashback showing the event. Actually, you don’t have to imagine because they made an entire film around it, and it was the dullest and least imaginative Star Wars film ever made (and also managed to squander the perfect casting of Donald Glover as the slick-talking Lando Calrissian by making him a simp for a droid whose personality gets loaded into the memory banks of the Millennium Falcon…wait, who wrote this shit?). The viewer doesn’t need the backstory to know that Han is a fast talking rogue who is way more impressed with himself than anybody else is because a few lines of dialogue and Harrison Ford’s laconic but mesmerizing performance gives everything we need to know about the character.
The same is true for prior stories in a series unless they are part of one large story arc. The Netflix Daredevil series are each largely standalone; while the Kingpin is his constant nemesis through them, you don’t really need to watch each of them individually unless you absolutely feel like you need to know where his outfit comes from or how Vanessa entered his life. The minimal amount of exposition (that Matt Murdock is has eschewed his superhero identity, that Kingpin has been away but has come back to run for mayor and Vanessa has been running the criminal enterprise in the interim) is laid out pretty clearly, and if you need to know more you can go back to the beginning and start with the first series.
Stranger
+1
I don’t doubt that Deborah Ann Woll is a great actress, but in the Netflix Marvel shows I found that Karen Page was easily my least favourite character. She just seemed so dull (to me) and yet they kept cramming her into every series somehow.
Empire literally starts with an opening crawl to set up the story and catch up the audience. I’m not sure if I could have come up with a better example of my point (albeit it was copying the serials of yesteryear).
All they needed was some dialogue. A few sentences. It wasn’t the end of the world but it was sloppy. And it at least cost them one viewer. My wife is a very casual viewer of these things and even though we had watched the first season of the Netflix show together it was years ago. She was having trouble almost immediately (it didn’t help that Foggy looked very different than we remembered) and basically checked out.
I feel like I am giving this too much weight. It was minor problem but I guarantee it cost them some of their audience.
It might. Bullseye was not introduced, just shown. I actually was stunned; I assumed they would abandon that storyline, but he was indeed there. Same actor, too.
As someone who is a fan of the lock picking lawyer on YouTube, the way that he used that paperclip to open the lock was laughably bad. I guess it was only included to give him something to kill the fly with.