Tag Archives: Marvel’s Daredevil

‘Squawk Alley’: ‘Daredevil’ Refreshing

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I returned to Squawk Alley this morning, to discuss today’s debut of Marvel’s Daredevil, and my Quartz story about how terrific Marvel and Netflix’s first collaboration is. Here’s a portion of my segment (as usual, CNBC doesn’t stream the various Daredevil clips that were shown during the segment; there are placed with a big CNBC logo in the streaming footage).

I did today’s segment from CNBC’s Englewood Cliffs, N.J. headquarters, which is usually more convenient for me, but that won’t be the case for much longer. Stay tuned…

‘Daredevil’ refreshing: Quartz’s Lynch

Inside Netflix and Marvel’s Titanic Team Up on ‘Daredevil’

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Marvel is no stranger to powerhouse collaborations — look at next month’s Avengers: Age of Ultron — but its most promising, game-changing partnership this year has nothing to do with Iron Man and Captain America. Instead, it kicks off tomorrow, when its new TV series, Marvel’s Daredevil, debuts on Netflix. As I wrote at Quartz,

Bringing together Marvel and Netflix, Marvel’s Daredevil, which debuts its thrilling 13-episode first season on Netflix April 10, ushers in an Avengers-level teaming up of Hollywood titans. In the past few years, no two companies have changed the entertainment landscape as much as Marvel (now every studio is pursuing its own version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe) and Netflix (which between pioneering binge-watching and creating groundbreaking shows like Orange is the New Black, has knocked every other network on its heels). Now they are at it again, devising an exciting new path for the crowded TV superhero genre.

And the series — the first of five Marvel/Netflix shows that will culminate in Marvel’s The Defenders, an Avengers-like teamup of its “street-level heroes” — is fantastic:

Unlike the other TV superhero series, Daredevil is aimed at grownups—or, at least, not the kids who watch much of Netflix’s other superhero fare. Karen Paige (Deborah Ann Woll from True Blood), the firm’s first client turned secretary, notes that after the violent events of the first episode, “I don’t see the city anymore. All I see are its dark corners.” And that is where Daredevil lives: the show employs a very dark palette (after all, Murdock doesn’t need lights). While Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Marvel’s Agent Carter are glitzy and glossy, this one is gritty and grimy. An early episode features a brutal, gruesome decapitation; not something you’d find on any broadcast TV show.

But where Daredevil—which erases all memories of the mediocre 2003 film with Ben Affleck—really shines is in its inventive action sequences, particularly an ingeniously executed, prolonged fight sequence late in the second episode. It feels real, and brutal. You can see superheroes fighting back guys all over TV, but nowhere else does it feel this visceral.

Marvel and Netflix still have a long road ahead, but they couldn’t have asked for a better start to their partnership than Daredevil. Don’t miss the series when it debuts tomorrow!

Inside Netflix and Marvel’s titanic team up on Daredevil

Marvel’s TV Takeover: Television Chief Jeph Loeb on What’s Next After ‘Agent Carter’

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As Marvel’s Agent Carter wrapped its brisk, eight-episode first season in fine form last night, I spoke with Marvel’s head of television, Jeph Loeb, for this Daily Beast story about what’s on tap for the company next (five upcoming Netflix series, starting with Marvel’s Daredevil) and why Agent Carter was able to immediately connect with audiences in a way that Agents of SHIELD did not last season.

From its outset, Agent Carter received a much more enthusiastic response from audiences than S.H.I.E.L.D., which Loeb attributes to confusion over what exactly S.H.I.E.L.D. was when it premiered in fall 2013. “There were certain expectations about S.H.I.E.L.D. that people had,” he says. “Despite the fact that we had a very strong message out there which is ‘not all heroes are super,’ I still think people came to the show thinking that the Hulk was going to be in the first episode and Iron Man was going to be in the second episode and Cap was going to be in the third episode. But once they got into the show and realized, ‘Oh, look at all these characters and look at this world and look at what we’re getting out of it,’ then they were ready to get into the show and take it where it was. With Carter, there was no misinformation. It was: Here she is, this is the world that we’re in.”

And even with seven Marvel series on-air and in the pipelione, Loeb doesn’t think the market is oversaturated yet:

“There’ll always be room to expand. This isn’t about which shows we’re doing. It really is about, ‘What’s the best story?’ We’ve never chosen any of our shows based on a particular need as much as the stories that we want to tell and how they can work both to help build out the brand, and at the same time help build out the storytelling that we’re doing,” he says. “Part of the reason why the Netflix shows happened was because we’ve wanted to be able to tell the stories of the street-level heroes, and that was a better fit for that network than what we were doing over at ABC. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other shows at either network that wouldn’t be fun and exciting to do.”

Check out the rest of the interview, in which Loeb reveals which Marvel actor is already begging for a Daredevil cameo, how Marvel keeps track of all the characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and which films/shows they’ve appeared on and why the company’s TV moves aren’t a response to whatever rival DC is doing.

Marvel’s TV Takeover: Television Chief Jeph Loeb on What’s Next After ‘Agent Carter’