Six Reasons You Should Be Watching Daredevil

5. Hell’s Kitchen is the most fully realized MCU setting we’ve seen

Hell’s Kitchen is a vital part of the Daredevil mythos in the comics, one of those rare settings that almost becomes a character in its own right. I wasn’t sure it would work the same way on TV, especially since it’s nothing like the places Marvel has taken us so far, but the people behind the series really outdid themselves in establishing the right feel.

As many critics have noted, the way the show is shot helps set the stage. When it’s nighttime in Hell’s Kitchen, you can almost understand why one character says all she sees are threats. It looks like a place you would not want to be walking alone, where a masked vigilante might actually be needed to give its citizens a sense of normalcy once the sun goes down.

There are also some similarities to Gotham in the sense that the corrupt seem to outnumber the just, though without that show’s tendency to take that idea to a ridiculous extreme. There is goodness there, notably in the form of Rosario Dawson’s Claire Temple, but it’s in constant danger of being drowned in darkness. The people in power are so entrenched and so assured in their superiority that even the hero questions whether they can be unseated.

Marvel even through in a semi-plausible reason that the neighborhood is slightly behind the times, technologically and architecturally speaking, which we’ll get to in a moment. Suffice it to say that while New York was merely a backdrop for the climactic battle in The Avengers, Hell’s Kitchen is a living, breathing organism of sorts in Daredevil. It’s a small but important difference.

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