“NOBODY EVER SUGGESTED Toronto. Nobody ever suggested Atlanta. It was always going to be in New York,” Daredevil: Born Again showrunner Dario Scardapane says on a Friday afternoon, addressing a long-running critique that has plagued the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “I don’t think you could shoot Daredevil correctly in a stand-in city. The character is enmeshed in New York. It’s in his soul.”
You have to have some sympathy for the creators, writers, and directors working on Marvel properties. DC Comics has the luxury of fictional locales to play with; Christopher Nolan can cast three different American cities as “Gotham” and no one bats an eye. But the Marvel Cinematic Universe is set in Peter Parker’s Forest Hills, Steve Rogers’s Brooklyn Heights, and Matt Murdock’s Hell’s Kitchen. For years, persnickety, city-fluent nerds have called out the bodegas and street meat carts set up on corners in Atlanta—where the MCU shoots most of its films and shows—that are supposed to stand in as the most distinct and iconographic city on Earth.
Netflix’s streaming Marvel properties, which aired between 2015 and 2019, were founded on a principle that has at last fully bled into its Disney+ streamers: They shot their stories about New York, on location in New York. Beginning in 2021 with Hawkeye, set during the holiday season in New York with set pieces shot at Rockefeller Center, the show actually delivered some of the magic and warmth of that time of the year in Midtown Manhattan. Then in 2022, Ms. Marvel nailed Jersey City, its South Asian Muslim enclave, and stands as what is still probably the best Disney+ series, solely based on the merits of being a television show about actual human beings. (The connective tissue between Ms. Marvel and the Daredevil: Born Again, which debuted last month, is executive producer Sana Amanat, a co-creator of the character Ms. Marvel, born and raised in New Jersey.)
Even Daredevil: Born Again’s B-roll doesn’t settle for the obvious square park arches and architectural financial district landmarks. When subway stations are shot, the station signs are shot in full, grounding you in the exact “where” at all times. It’s a story deeply rooted in New York culture and history, one that wants nothing more than to spend all its time, as one character in the footage says, rooting for the “Rangers, Jets, Mets baby, all day.” From the attitudes of the characters to the note-perfect shade of blue and accompanying chyron coming with NY1 news updates, to tins of Cafe Bustelo in Washington Heights apartments, the show also sounds and feels lived-in to anyone who has ever spent an extended period of time in New York City.
The first episode opens with the camera pulling back and revealing the splayed street signs at the intersection of 10th Avenue and West 51st Street. The first lines of dialogue are Foggy, Matt, and Karen, griping about gentrification, a beloved diner closing and being replaced by a SoulCycle. On a date, Murdock busts balls because his love interest is from an outer borough, before dropping Astoria Sandwich Shop lore. These are types of conversation you could go out to any neighborhood haunt in Manhattan and overhear a version of at any given moment in time.
The action is largely based on Charles Soule’s nearly decade old Mayor Fisk arc in Daredevil comics. “Because of the story centering around the mayor of New York, we wanted to get the feeling of a city from the people in it, which gave us a real flavor of New York.” Scardapane says.
This is accomplished with on-the-street interviews (handled by line producers Sean Dunne and Cass Greener) under the guise of The BB Report (run by BB Urich, a journalist related to a character from the original Netflix Daredevil series played by Genneya Walton), a likely online interview show getting “real” New Yorkers to speak their feelings about the city. Over a soundscape of street noise, beleaguered but friendly citizens pause their days briefly for a candid conversation with the reporter. It’s made up of an assortment of New Yorkers, presumably from across the political spectrum. But the general tenor is fed-up city dwellers who feel let down by the system. (A skateboarder sitting on his deck on an empty basketball court at the beginning of episode 6: “Our cops here, they don’t really do much.”)
As it turns out, these weren’t just shot as documentary style interviews.
“The best way to put it is that they were actors, but there was no script. They were just asked certain questions, and then when they would answer we would have them replace a word or two with ‘Daredevil’ or ‘Fisk,’” Scardapane says. Dunne and Greener were smart enough to use the human material as it presented itself, to bump the authenticity. In one scene, an actor accentuates his points on camera with a half-eaten bagel.
“That was not scripted in any way shape or form,” Scardapane says. He was just eating a bagel for lunch when he came to work, and so we said, yeah, right on.”
The Red Hook waterfront in Brooklyn is the site of a season-long plotline, and another example of how Born Again uses New York’s history, as well as its geographical quirks, to inform its story.
“The Dinkins regime put out press releases about revitalizing Red Hook, and then that didn’t happen,” Scardapane says. “And then in May 2024, there’s a big announcement about the revitalization of the port. So Red Hook has always been this kind of mayoral bugaboo. And it’s an amazing location to shoot at. You can’t stage a car chase in New York faster than 25 miles an hour, but if you’re in a controlled area, you can go faster.”
The show is full of this style of Dad History and civic politics, from Fiorello LaGuardia’s desk to a shithead errand boy of Fisk’s informing him that his base of support comes from Staten Island. These flourishes are not only Robert Caro-level nerdy easter eggs, but an attempt to tell a larger story about a fascist villain and his militarized police force operating outside the law, about New Yorkers and their frustrations and what their dissatisfaction has resulted in historically. Born Again is about New York City, about all cities, and about societies.
“We wanted to have little echoes to the real history of City Hall and Gracie Mansion, to get the sense that for Wilson Fisk, politics is another world to conquer, a way to show New York how much he loves it in his crushing manner,” Scardapane says. “It’s based on the rise of an autocrat, or the rise of a criminal to power, which has happened so many times in history. That was something we really wanted to get across: New York elected Fisk, he didn’t steal it.”
Scardapane continues, laughing: “We are not an allegory!”
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Contributor
Flatbush local, former mayor of New York City
By filming on location in the Big Apple, Marvel’s latest crime-fighting series feels particularly authentic and lived-in. Read More