As someone who has never read a Daredevil comic book but is vaguely familiar with the character and his origin, here are my overall thoughts on the show:
- The cast is very solid. It
did take me a while to get used the baby-faced guy who plays Foggy since he looked a kid wearing his dad's clothes. But eventually I got over it - his performance was perfectly fine.
- Fisk is unquestionably the best villain in the MCU now. Granted that's not exactly saying much since the lack of compelling, non-throwaway villains has been an ongoing problem with the MCU. But man, D'Onofrio killed it. I think he pushed Fisk's bizarre speech pattern a bit
too much in a couple scenes, but overall he was great.
-
Holy crap my wish was granted and we finally got some real-ass drama in this universe. For once we had serious, brutal action and dialogue sequences where someone didn't crack a joke to break the tension at the end. I was getting so tired of that Whedon-induced trope infiltrating its way into every film in the MCU. I'm glad everyone involved actually took this shit seriously.
- Matt is undoubtedly Marvel's best attempt at having a morally flawed hero on-screen. I liked that his hypocrisy about trusting in the law to get the job done (when he clearly didn't) was brought up to his face a couple of times.
- I loved that Matt repeatedly got his ass kicked - and not just the usual "the bad guy got a few good punches in" type of ass kicked. He was almost straight-up
killed multiple times. It made the outcomes of the fights less predictable, which I appreciated.
- Loved the fight choreography, it definitely sets a new bar for TV shows. Although I will admit that on more than one occasion when DD was doing the fancy spins and flips during a fight I kept thinking of this gif:
I didn't think the show was perfect, it had some of the usual first-season growing pains. Having to dedicate heavy chunks of the show's runtime to establishing a number of origins and flashbacks is sort of a necessary evil with shows like this. Which is why I'm looking forward to the (assumed) Season 2. Now that we've set-up the DD mini-universe, they'll have more freedom to spend time on the present-day events.
Oh, and I'll just say it - I think Daredevil is now the most interesting character in the whole MCU
by a country mile.