Daredevil Season 3 is Amazing and Already from a Different Era
The fourth episode of the third season of Netflix’s Daredevil contains what is perhaps the most technically impressive one-take shot in television history. An eleven minute ‘oner’ that begins with a multi-party fight in an infirmary, moves to an intense and emotional and plot-relevant conversation in a storage closet, and then climaxes in an escape/fight sequence through an honest-to-God prison riot. Even if the rest of the season had been an utter disappointment (it wasn’t), watching Daredevil Season 3 would be worth it just to experience the sheer action-filmmaking triumph that is the prison fight one-take. The shot is the cinematic centerpiece of an overall fantastic season, and just reading about how the Daredevil crew pulled it off is thrilling.
But, in a strange way, watching that sequence feels like watching TV from a different creative era, when television had different goals and different tools it favored.
Before we go further, I should acknowledge how late I am to the Daredevil Season 3 party. I understand that a lot of readers will believe that I am two years behind, and now most things worth saying about this show have already been said. But if we are to take the oft-repeated adage that television is the new literature seriously, we must start actually treating TV like we treat books. And one of the greatest and most important things we do with books we love is see how they age, how their stories translate a year or a decade or a century after they were written. Out instincts tell us to avoid this with television. The medium traditionally depends on immediacy. But watching Daredevil Season 3 (originally released in 2018) here in 2020 is, I believe, an entirely different experience from watching it within a month of it’s release date.
Think about the last decade transition our culture went through, from the 2000s to the 2010s. In the 2000s, cable television was still a dominant force in our popular culture. In fact, the era beginning in 1999 with the pilot episode of HBO’s The Soprano’s and ending at either the series finale of AMC’s Breaking Bad (2013), the series finale of AMC’s Mad Men (2015), the season 1 release of Netflix’s Stranger Things (2016), or the series finale of HBO’s Game of Thrones (2019) is commonly considered the Golden Age of Television. So the 2000s was a decade in which audiences witnessed a medium discovering itself. Golden Age television is distinguished by a recognition of unconventional protagonists (both in terms of racial/sexual identity and morality as dictated by circumstance), serialization, visual storytelling, ambiguity in writing, and a focus on more serious and darker themes than had been accepted earlier.
That era of television is, unfortunately, considered to have ended by all major cultural critics; although (as noted above) the exact date of its’ end is still very much up for debate. But look at those parenthesized dates in the preceding paragraph again, notice how they all extend a trend that is focused in the 2000s some varying amount of years into the 2010s. While some of the specifics of Golden Age television did change in the latter half of the era: a late-stage acceptance of fantasy/sci-fi due to Game of Thrones, a general trend toward more female main characters instead of the eventual cliché of the male anti-hero, shorter seasons, and a blurring of the line between comedy and drama; there is a very real argument to be made that television of the 2000s and the 2010s are two different halves of the same creative era.
At the very least, it is impossible to argue that there was an obviously visible dividing line between television produced in one of those decades compared to the other, both in terms of the content of the shows and how the audience perceived them. We like to separate these years into specific eras, with their own troubles and obsessions and television; but the truth is it never quite works like that. Culture blurs. It refuses to separate into neat eras and classifications.
2020 might just be the year that disproves all that.
I may be the 5,112,546th person on the internet to write this (and the eighth person to tell you this today), but 2020 has been eventful fucking year. There are some who say it is one of, if not the most eventful year in American history. It is, of course, impossible to say for sure, but you and I both know a lot has happened. We are (STILL!) living through a global pandemic the likes of which our planet hasn’t seen for a century. Our economy at a planetary scale has ground to a halt, and most economists believe we are already in or are headed toward another major recession. We underwent some of the largest protests for racial justice in human history. And we just finished the most brutal and contentious (in spirit, if not in final vote tallies, which are clearly in Biden’s favor) American election in recent memory. A lot has happened, is the point.
Now, a lot happens in pretty much every year, whether or not that year has an election or kicks off a new decade as this one does. The difference for 2020 is that a lot happened in ways that affected basically everyone at basically the same time (within the year). This is due mostly to the COVID pandemic and the racial justice protests; both of which were not expected at the beginning of the year and reached an incredibly wide and diverse swath of people. Never before has there been such a clear dividing line between eras in our cultural memory than 2020.
Watching an excellent season of TV from the previous era, like Daredevil Season 3, made this new division shockingly stark to me.
It’s clear even from the structure and corporate ownership of the season that it is from an earlier time. Each season of Netflix’s Daredevil runs 13 episodes which is a marathon by current prestige TV standards, even if the show only debuted in 2015. The Boys, a comparable dark superhero show that is decidedly not from the Golden Age, runs only eight episodes per season for comparison. One important staple of ‘Streaming Wars‘ era television is short seasons; a lot of different series, but not a lot of each individual show. It means shows are cheaper to produce and all the various streaming services can pump out as many shows as possible to nail down every demographic available as loyal subscribers.
This philosophy of television capitalism (which only began to gain purchase in the last couple years as it became clear the Golden Age was over) is also reflected in the fact that Netflix licensed a Marvel property. There is no way this could have happened in 2020. Disney now owns both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and it’s own successful streaming service in Disney+. Disney leasing the rights to a famous property like Daredevil to a competing streamer is just unthinkable now. Also unthinkable for Disney in 2020 is making the sort of Daredevil show that Netflix did; one that is dark and complex and violent and morally ambiguous. Disney+ strives to maintain a family-friendly reputation. Netflix’s Daredevil would never have been greenlit at all in 2020. It had to be made in the previous era.
It goes deeper than that, of course. It concerns the two dueling genres at the heart of Netflix’s Daredevil: Superhero Show and Crime Drama. Daredevil, as a series, was at it’s strongest when it allowed the conflict between these two genres out in the open. When Matt Murdoch and Foggy Nelson and Karen Paige had to debate the pros and cons of working within the legal system or outside it. This conflict grounds the show and keeps every fanciful ‘Marvel’ thing that happens within a believable framework. It’s used especially well in the third season, and, ironically, helps make Wilson Fisk (Kingpin) feel like a true supervillain when the viewer is made aware of just how skillfully he manipulates the system and everyone within it.
This conflict, so beautifully rendered here, is also clearly of an earlier era. The Crime Drama was perhaps the most important ‘serious’ television genre during the golden age, counting among it’s followers: The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Breaking Bad, Dexter, Sons of Anarchy, True Detective, Sherlock, Prison Break, Luther, etc…. But while the genre has not disappeared (and probably won’t ever), the biggest shows of the current era are rarely from that formerly dominant corner of television.
It’s not worth going into the cultural supremacy of the superhero genre for the past two decades; if you’ve paid attention to pop culture at all you know how important this genre is. But it’s worth noting that 2020 was the first year in at least a decade in which Marvel did not release a movie. Nor did DC. And the only major superhero releases this year were TV shows that were either comic, slightly ironic takes on the genre (The Umbrella Academy), or cynical and dark attacks on the worst of the genre’s excesses (The Boys). Daredevil contains critical and in-depth analysis of both genre’s at the heart of the show, but the exercise is earnest. It takes the genres and itself seriously. That would not fly in 2020.
There are plenty of other differences of era that will jump out at you if you watch the season in 2020. The show’s mostly uncomplicated and unquestioned promotion of the NYPD, for example, is hard to imagine a serious crime drama even attempting (or wanting to attempt) in 2020. There’s a brief scene in which a white woman threatens three black teens with the police and then pulls a gun on them, and the viewer is expected to remain on her side. One can’t imagine this idea even being proposed in a writer’s room in 2020. While these are for the most part minor issues (the sincerity of genre and purpose, and willingness to go dark and morally ambiguous are very much missed, in fact), they clearly mark the show when viewed from the other side of the pandemic and racial protests.
The shot, written about in hagiographic detail earlier in the article, is also something from the previous era of television. While television had been growing more and more visually sophisticated during the Golden Age, it was True Detective’s own famous ‘oner‘ that really upped the ante in that area of television filmmaking. One-takes grew more common, Daredevil had a famous one in Season 1, even It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia had their own (incredible) attempt. It spawned something of an arms race in the extravagance of TV cinematography. TV now had to be beautiful, not just compelling. To the point that surfaces began to cover up shallow interiors. Shows that were sumptuous to observe, but hollow on the inside (looking at you Hannibal/Ozark/Westworld/Ray Donovan etc…).
Television has grown to be smaller scale now. Shorter seasons, more focus on half-hour shows than hour-long shows, smaller budgets, more series but each with less clout. This makes sense, our lives have become smaller scale as well. Days spent inside, gatherings of friends or family limited to six or so, many entertainment venues closed. Life went on pause, and so many film and television productions went on pause as well. Lots of money has been lost. What comes back after, what the new era specifies into, will take that into account. It will most likely reflect our smaller lives, with smaller budgets and more animation (easier to make from home). It’ll be a bit more cynical when it comes to certain genres. A thirteen episode season will feel huge. And, unfortunately, we have probably moved past the era in which a self-serious superhero/crime show can plan and shoot an 11-minute one-take action sequence. Some things will be lost as we move forward, and some things will be gained.
Times change. It’s rare that we get to mark that change as clearly as we can mark this one. Sometimes it just takes an incredible television show from an earlier era to help us see it. Check out something from the Golden Age and see for yourself.
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