IS MARVEL TELEVISION FINALLY READY TO KICK THE MCU TO THE CURB?

Daredevil: Born Again offers a flash of hope for small-screen superheroes. By Alan Sepinwall

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In the first episode of Daredevil: Born Again, Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) teases best friends Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) about their nostalgia for a pre-gentrification Hell's Kitchen. "Not nostalgia," Foggy insists. "Reverence for the past, yet hope for the future."

It's an apt exchange to begin the Disney+ series, which sees Cox, Woll, Henson, and others reprising their roles from the mid-2010s Daredevil show, where Matt split his time between his legal practice and his extracurricular work as the titular red-clad vigilante. The Netflix series is considered by many comics fans to be the high point of the first wave of Marvel Comics TV adaptations from that decade, which have been treated by current Marvel management mostly as if they never happened. Marvel nerds may not feel nostalgia for some of those other shows, like Helstrom, but there was palpable excitement in theaters when Cox cameoed as Matt in Spider-Man: No Way Home, hope for a future where that era wasn't snapped out of existence, Thanos-style.

The creation of Marvel Cinematic Universe-adjacent shows was a fraught exercise back when the TV and film operations had separate teams. Jeph Loeb, then the head of Marvel Television, liked to say that the projects were "all connected," but those links were one-sided: Loeb's shows had to work around plots from Kevin Feige's films, but never vice versa. ABC's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.