As Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has demonstrated more than once, it can be tricky to balance the episodic nature of television with the long arcs that keep people coming back for more. But apparently, that won’t be a concern for Daredevil; it’s going to be designed to binge watch.
Daredevil will be the first of four interconnected miniseries coming to Netflix from Marvel in 2014, and yes, they’ll all be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And apparently, according to an interview with Joe Quesada on ScreenRant, Daredevil at least is designed to be watched in one go:
One of the advantages is really from the planning stage — obviously it’s much easier to work with a smaller number of episodes than it is with a larger number of episodes. We can sit there and look at 13 episodes and plan it out as a very large movie. It makes seeing the bigger picture a little bit easier.
On the one hand, good. It’s good to see that Marvel is thinking about this differently than a typical TV series. On the other hand, that does raise a pretty big concern. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. spent the bulk of its first season dancing around the massive reveal hidden in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and the field is just getting more crowded. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. got renewed, and with it is the Agent Carter miniseries. If Agent Carter delivers, and honestly being a Bond movie starring Hayley Atwell sounds like it’ll be a hit, it might either get renewed or mean that every year ABC runs another MCU miniseries.
That’s on top of the at least two movies a year we’ll be seeing through 2018, plus four other miniseries on Netflix, and there are rumors that Marvel wants to get into the low-budget action movie game as well. We’re not concerned about “Marvel overload” in the sense that audiences will stop watching Marvel stuff, we’re concerned that eventually they’re going to start ditching series when they decide they don’t need to be watching every Marvel tidbit.
We’ll see, of course, and hell, we’ll watch every episode either way. But we hope for Marvel’s sake they let these shows be a bit more independent.