The Hollywood Reporter published a story today about an overhaul at Marvel, unpacking all of its television and what plans it has for the future. The skinny of it all is simply that the team over at Marvel seems to have realized that television cannot continue to serve as 6-episode movie arcs for its characters. While it works with shows like WandaVision and Loki, there are other shows in the Marvel canon that would have benefitted from being approached more like, well, TV shows. The show that seems to have broken this “mold” for the team is Daredevil: Born Again.
That, frankly, makes the most sense. Daredevil was already an established show during the Netflix era of Marvel shows. It had a writers’ room, a pilot, and a three-season arc that included time with Matt Murdock on shows like The Defenders. Charlie Cox has been playing Matt through all this, and frankly, if any show were going to give a heads up to Marvel that something wasn’t working in its approach to TV, it should be Daredevil. THR reports that the series was reviewed by Marvel leadership during the writers’ and actors’ strikes, and they decided to scrap the direction it was going in favor of a more “serialized” TV approach.
While this is for the better, it does mean that there will be a delay in getting shows that had fans excited, like Daredevil: Born Again. The point of all this is simply that Marvel coming to this realization while there is still time to adjust is a good thing, despite the initial upset over hearing the word “delay.” Knowing that they’re working to adjust their strategy for the better means that they do want this to work and for fans to have the shows they deserve with heroes like Matt Murdock at the helm.
Sometimes, it’s okay to take a pause
It’s not surprising that it took Matt Murdock and Daredevil to help them realize this. In fact, it was the benefit She-Hulk: Attorney at Law saw from giving Jessica Gao some more traditional showrunner duties that made them see they had the wrong strategy with these shows in the first place—the show that brought Charlie Cox back to Marvel television (though he had already made an appearance in Spider-Man: No Way Home.) Jessica Gao, who wrote the series, oversaw a lot of the post-production, which wasn’t really normal for Marvel but made a world of difference. Marvel saw that and it inspired a change in how they plan to approach their shows moving forward.
Not that Daredevil himself had anything to do with that, but that show did give us the news that Matt would be getting his own show again, and then that new show getting an overhaul also being a catalyst makes a lot of sense because it was a blueprint for Marvel television within the Marvel Cinematic Universe as it stands. While it might be frightening to see this news and think that we’re losing our Matt again, I’m choosing to look at this in a positive way. They don’t want to bring one of their best shows back in a way that won’t work for fans.
(featured image: Netflix)
