The most-watched show in my house this spring features a blind lawyer who beats men unconscious in a stairwell, and my thirteen-year-old asked to watch it with me.
That's the sentence I keep turning over, because it says less about my parenting than about what we've all quietly agreed to call entertainment. "Daredevil: Born Again" arrived on Disney+ with the full weight of the Marvel machine behind it, reuniting Charlie Cox's Matt Murdock with Vincent D'Onofrio's Wilson Fisk.
The pitch is simple: the devil of Hell's Kitchen versus the kingpin of New York, now with a mayor's office and a badge.
It is well made, genuinely well made, and that's the problem.
Craft is how you smuggle brutality past the gate.
American screens have been bloody since the dime novel.
The show asks us to admire a man whose solution to a broken system is to break bodies, and it does so with the moral seriousness of a documentary.
The audience is meant to feel the weight of every blow, and then feel good about feeling bad.
Meanwhile, the actual city the show romanticizes is one where people ride the subway wondering who's yelling, where a shove on a platform is a nightly possibility.
We've stopped being shocked by violence in fiction at exactly the moment we've grown numb to it in fact.
There's a scene in the new season where Fisk, the mobster turned mayor, talks about order, about cleaning up the streets, and the writing is smart enough that half the audience nods along.
It knows we're tempted by strongmen who promise to fix things by force.
It hands us the temptation, lets us taste it, and calls it prestige television.
But it feeds it at industrial scale, in four-quadrant packages designed to be watched by families, marketed with toys, and discussed at work the next morning.
A character created in 1964 as a street-level curiosity is now a global product whose central question, "how much force is justified," gets answered the same way every episode.
And the streaming economy rewards exactly this.
Shows that ask hard questions get cancelled.
Shows that let you watch a man in a mask hit someone until the theme music swells get renewed, and get a second season before the first one finishes airing.
The next show is darker, and the one after that is darker still, and each time we tell ourselves we're watching it for the writing.
I don't think "Daredevil: Born Again" is a symptom of civilizational decline.
That's too easy, and it lets us off the hook.
What it is, is a mirror held up at a flattering angle, one that tells us our appetite for righteous violence is sophisticated rather than ordinary.
The closing thought is this: we can keep pretending the devil suit is just a costume, or we can admit that we tune in because some part of us wants a man who solves problems with his fists.
That part of us is older than Marvel, and it's not going away.
Final Thoughts
The only real question is whether we're honest about it.