Darkness And / Or Light: Drew Goddard Reportedly Writing Daredevil TV Show

There’s been a lot of news out of Marvel Studios this past week or so, which would be exciting if it weren’t for the fact that every time Marvel Studios does anything it makes me want to excitedly haul out my wallet and throw more money around. The only reason we haven’t seen Thor: The Dark World yet is because it is the first Marvel movie since Iron Man to not play at our local theater, and because we were busy battling our own Godforsaken evil in the form of an angry hot water heater.

Last week, Marvel Studios announced that they were teaming with Netflix to put out four direct-to-streaming television series, based on Daredevil, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, and Jessica Jones (or Brian Michael Bendis’s Alias if you’re nasty). They’re planning on doing a 13-episode series a piece, and apparently things are already approaching the pre-production stage, because there are reports that Marvel Studios is in talks with World War Z and former Buffy The Vampire Slayer writer Drew Goddard to write Daredevil.

Now, if these reports are true (Goddard’s people wouldn’t comment on the reports), on one hand this is a great news, as Goddard has shown he can work well on serialized genre television on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and he told Collider back in 2012 that he grew up as a Daredevil nut:

You’re talking to a guy who had quotes from Daredevil painted on his wall while growing up…  Even when I was 18, I still had the blood red door with the, “I have shown him that a man without hope is a man without fear [from Frank Miller’s Born Again].” That was what I loved and so it’s the sort of thing that if we can find the right project, I would love to do it.

This news is… kinda weird. While I’m all for someone tackling a Frank Miller-style version of Daredevil, it might seem a little weird for a writer on a quippy show like Buffy to tackle that kind of almost relentlessly dark project. After all, Goddard namechecks Born Again, which takes everything away from Matt Murdock and leaves him shitfaced and stinking in a New York alleyway. However, Goddard wrote Buffy season seven episode Lies My Mother Told Me – the one where Wood almost kills Spike while Spike relives his past as a Slayer killer – which is one of my favorite episodes and a decidedly dark episode. And since Goddard was the Executive Story Editor during the last season of Angel – you know, the season that ended with every character becoming a treacherous, backshooting murderer (sometimes literally – hi, Lorne!) and implied that they were all killed by an army of demons? – was not exactly what you’d call light entertainment.

So Godddard probably has the chops to do a full-noir Daredevil… but the problem is that, for the past couple years, Daredevil has specifically not been a noir character. Daredevil writer Mark Waid has gone out of his way to lighten the character up from the Miller version that dominated the comics since the 80s, and he’s won an Eisner Award for his efforts. With that said, Waid and current Daredevil artist Chris Samnee are leaving Daredevil in February, which gives Marvel plenty of time to put together a creative team to bring Daredevil back to more of a dark, noir book, if they want the comic to be more of a match towards a darker TV version.

Of course, all of this assumes that Goddard and / or Marvel Studios actually want a dark, Milleresque version of Daredevil for TV. The Marvel Studios movies have not exactly been bastions of darkness – the studio told Iron Man 3 director Shane Black not to riff on the classic Iron Man alcoholism story Demon In A Bottle, which I still maintain the writers just changed from heavy drinking into panic attacks – so maybe a Waid-like lighter take on Daredevil is what were in store for. In which case, having a guy who’s worked on a quip-filled Joss Whedon project or two is still probably a good idea.

All of which means that I’ve spent a few hundred words to say that Drew Goddard is probably a good choice to work on the Daredevil TV show whether they go with Miller route or the Waid route… so long as they don’t go the Rex Smith route.

(via The Wrap)