The nine episode first season of the Marvel series Daredevil: Born Again just made its premiere on Disney+ earlier this month (you can read our review HERE), and we’re already closing in on the end of the run, as the fifth and sixth episodes dropped onto the streaming service yesterday. Although the initial plan was to rework some elements and make Daredevil: Born Again stand separate from the Netflix Daredevil series (despite sharing some cast members), the show underwent a creative overhaul when the writers and actors strikes shut down production in 2023. Now, this series is a direct follow-up to the Netflix series, picking up five years later… and it has been revealed that episode 5 was the only one that was “completely untouched” by the creative overhaul!
Dario Scardapane, who worked on Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan and the Netflix series The Punisher, was brought in to serve as showrunner on Daredevil: Born Again during the creative overhaul. The behind-the-scenes shake-up also led to Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, the directing team who were at the helm of multiple episodes of Moon Knight and Loki season 2, being hired as the primary directors on the show. Matt Corman and Chris Ord were previously the head writers on the show, but they were let go.
The cast of the series includes Charlie Cox, Vincent D’Onofrio, Elden Henson, Deborah Ann Woll, Jon Bernthal, Wilson Bethel, and Ayelet Zurer, reprising the roles of Matt Murdock / Daredevil, Wilson Fisk / Kingpin, Murdock’s associates Foggy Nelson and Karen Page, Frank Castle / The Punisher, Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter / Bullseye, and Vanessa Marianna Fisk. Also in the cast are Margarita Levieva as Matt Murdock’s love interest Heather Glenn, Michael Gandolfini as a character named Daniel Blade, Genneya Walton as BB Urich, Jeremy Earl as Anti-Vigilante Task Force member Cole North, and Lou Taylor Pucci as a character named Adam.
During an appearance on the Phase Hero podcast, episode 5 director Jeffrey Nachmanoff said (with thanks to SuperHeroHype for the transcription), “This episode is the only completely untouched episode, I believe, from the original version of the show before we went back and reworked it. You can feel that. It has that bottle episode feel because it’s just Matt for the most part. This is a bank heist gone wrong episode, and you treat it as its own contained story. That’s what we did. We actually shot it in the same bank down on Wall Street where they shot Inside Man.“
If you’re disappointed to realize that Daredevil: Born Again is almost over already, there is a silver lining here: season 2 of the show already started filming at the end of February, so we probably won’t have to wait very long to see the next batch of episodes. Matthew Lillard (Scream) joins the cast for season 2.
What do you think of Daredevil: Born Again episode 5 being the only one that wasn’t affected by the creative overhaul? Did you enjoy the episode? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
