Is 'Daredevil: Born Again' the only TV show really taking on the Trump era?

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The situation is bad: New York City is run by a feckless criminal, uninterested in the workings of government but full of rhetoric that, while lofty, carries an air of menace directed at any who would oppose his grand schemes. Worse, his supporters are legion, vocal, and given to bouts of violence. The police, meanwhile, are just as corrupt and cruel as the mayor, and while they are nominally at war with the gangs and psychos who roam the streets and subways, both sides seem to have a common enemy: you, the everyday citizen just trying to live your life.

So what do you, my dear subscriber? How do you carry on, day after day, in a proto-fascist world that’s out to get you? How do you oppose the venal powers that be, if you even dare to oppose them? How far can you trust the system to correct itself and its abusers, or is the system—are all systems—fundamentally unsalvageable?

These are the questions that haunt Daredevil: Born Again, the new Disney+ continuation of Daredevil, the Marvel series that ran on Netflix for three seasons, from 2015 to 2018. This incarnation preserves the tone of the original: dark, viscerally violent, and full of despair—quite an achievement for the Mickey Mouse channel.

If you’re not up on your second-tier Marvel superheroes, here’s the Daredevil story: Matt Murdock, a good Irish Catholic boy being raised by his boxer dad in Hell’s Kitchen, is one day hit by a truck carrying radioactive waste; the chemicals rob him of his eyesight but supercharge his other senses, enabling him to “see” the world around him in incredible detail—and to become the kind of mixed-martial-arts bad-ass who leaps from midnight rooftops in pursue of evildoers. By day, however, he’s Matt Murdock, Attorney at Law, whose legal talents are often overshadowed by his devotion to the underserved and oft-abused people of Hell’s Kitchen (and beyond).

His perpetual nemesis: Eric Adams Eric Trump Donald Trump Wilson Fisk, the big, bad, bald, brilliant, and often emotional mob boss known as Kingpin, who kicks off Daredevil: Born Again by deciding he wants to become mayor of New York City and then, in the absence of a credible opponent and amid a crime wave for which he is partly responsible, succeeding to the clamor of the biggest mob of all.

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Daredevil and Kingpin have been doing battle now for more than 40 years, so please don’t expect the new show to resolve their differences. Instead, watch it to see how it explores the current moment, both in New York and in the United States.

On the one side, we have Murdock, played by the British actor Charlie Cox, who after the murder of his best friend has decided he really doesn’t want to be Daredevil anymore. He’s a lawyer, after all—surely, he believes, he can use his legal abilities, questionable as they often are, to bring Fisk and his cronies to justice, and to protect the city he loves. This faith is admirable. It’s what I’d like to think we all want—for an orderly, lawful system of law and order to work as intended.

Except that Murdock’s triumphs are thwarted, again and again, by people who just don’t give a damn about the system. Witnesses are threatened, the vindicated are murdered, and when everyday citizens come to Murdock for help, they accept his promises and kind words but they—and he—both know there are hard limits to what he can accomplish. There’s only so much he can do in court. Unless, of course, he turns his own back on the system. Unless he turns to out and out vigilante violence to deal with his foes. Unless he turns into Daredevil again.

But for most of the four episodes that have run so far, we are denied the pleasure of watching Daredevil kick ass. Instead, we get the pleasure of watching Wilson Fisk struggle as mayor. He is wholly uninterested in the workings of the city, ignoring his veteran political consultant in favor of a slick, tubby toady (played by Michael Gandolfini!) who is as loyal to the mayor as he is sloppy and incompetent. Instead, Fisk prefers to rule by decree—to make things happen when and where he wants, like granting a construction permit on the spot to a road crew fixing a pothole. Cue the cheers from folks stuck in a traffic jam that could probably have been alleviated by congestion pricing.

Yet even Fisk, who has killed so many people with such brutality—from beating his own father to death with a hammer as a child to decapitating someone with a car door—cannot entirely avoid the ridiculous, quotidian duties of the mayor. In episode four, he is forced to endure not only an elementary-school chorus singing “We Built This City (on Rock and Roll)” but also, the very same day, a middle-aged Latvian chorus’s rendition of the very same song.

And because Fisk is played by Vincent D’Onofrio, this is sheer delight. From his debut in Full Metal Jacket and his scene-stealing role in Men in Black to Law & Order: Criminal Intent, D’Onofrio has specialized in characters who are deeply uncomfortable with themselves—with the power of their bodies, with the antic workings of their minds—and he’s got much to work with in Fisk. The high genius of thugs, Fisk has taught himself to appreciate fine art, good wine, and true love—the rewards of cosmopolitanism. He’s even an admirer of Fiorello LaGuardia. And yet he’s on the verge of violence at all times. You can sense, even without Daredevil’s heightened abilities, that Fisk would gladly crush the skulls of those adorably warbling fifth-graders to escape their serenade. (Hell, I’d thank him for it.) That he doesn’t, and that he must surely be realizing he faces four years, possibly eight years, of such suffering almost seems like punishment enough. Almost.

Because we know what’s going to happen: violence. For both Fisk and Murdock, Kingpin and Daredevil, it’s the solution they know and love best, and it’s the very reason we’re watching a superhero show. But this is maybe the thing that makes Daredevil the series stand out—the violence is brutal. Not in the sense of comic-book grotesquerie but in the way each blow lands with a thud of weight and pain. People bruise, break, limp, concuss, die, survive. This is not John Wick. The violence is balletic at times, but not necessarily graceful: It often takes place in claustrophobic New York interiors—crappy tenement hallways, hospital stairwells, the unwatched gaps between buildings—so there are always walls to slam into, garbage bags to trip over, lights to flicker, bystanders to dodge or damage. No one makes it through a fight unscathed. Everyone gets hurt, including our boy Daredevil. He’s covered in scar tissue, inside and out. Is it damage, or is it armor?

And so this feels like where we are, too. The criminals and idiots have taken control, and we have a choice: Do we continue to trust a system that has failed us, that has allowed itself to be nearly destroyed? Or do we go outside of it, to hope that vigilantes and violence can somehow fix what voters and lawyers cannot? Both require wishful thinking—the former that enough good elements remain for the system to right itself, the latter that the tools of fascism can end fascism. For Matt Murdock, this is the struggle, as it is for all of us in 2025, and while his may have a satisfying resolution, thanks to talented comic-book screenwriters, ours may not. But we do at least have one advantage over Disney’s masterful storytellers: Our resolution is not yet written.

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It’s Good and I Like It: Common Side Effects

“What if there was a medicine that could heal almost anything?” is the question asked by Common Side Effects, the new HBO animated series executive-produced by Mike Judge, the genius who gave us Beavis & Butthead, King of the Hill, Office Space, Silicon Valley, and Idiocracy. It centers on a sad-sack environmentalist who discovers a Peruvian mushroom that can literally heal anything and everything (except perhaps death) and who finds himself pursued by the forces of both the government and Big Pharma. As with a lot of Mike Judge work, it starts out with stereotypes—evil CEOs, idealistic activists, odd-couple FBI agents, struggling New Yorkers—and then progressively undercuts those assumptions, adding new, unexpected layers of humanity to characters that years of television have trained us to overlook. And it’s not just hilarious, it’s also beautiful, animated by the same folks who gave us last year’s heartbreakingly inventive Scavengers Reign. You should watch it, because it’s good and I like it.

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