Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
You may have heard the term “peak TV” tossed around this year. There certainly is a lot of it; some outlets have run top 20 or top 40 lists of the best shows of the year, and still managed to leave off plenty of great stuff. We here at SportsAlcohol.com like watching TV, but we also like respecting your time. So we tried to winnow our group list down to ten. Then, when that didn’t really work, we went for twelve – thirteen with an unbreakable tie. This, to us, feels manageable. You can catch up on these thirteen shows and feel like you’ve gotten up to speed with the best the medium has to offer. In fact, we emphatically insist that you do so right as soon as you finish this list. Let’s go! Continue reading The Best TV Shows of 2015→
Rob is one of the founders of SportsAlcohol.com. He is a recent first time home buyer and it's all he talks about. Said home is in his hometown in Upstate New York. He never moved away and works a job to pay for his mortgage and crippling chicken wing addiction. He is not what you would call a go-getter. This may explain the general tone of SportsAlcohol.com.
Something has been building inside of me. I can’t hold it in any more.
It probably started during the run up to the release of Mark Steven Johnson’s Daredevil movie. This was during the height of media scrutiny of Daredevil star Ben Affleck’s relationship with Jennifer Lopez. If you weren’t watching a lot of TV in the early 00’s, it’s hard to describe exactly how over-covered their relationship was. People were sick of it, so they made jokes. It really took hold during the Bennifer backlash when it was reported that Ben Affleck filmed a cameo for the Elektra film but it was cut due to an anticipated negative reaction. It grew when Affleck was cast as Batman in the forthcoming Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. A lot of people made jokes. I found exactly one funny.
You read for a part, you feel good about it, you feel confident, then they cast Ben Affleck.
Then, the unthinkable happened: a legitimately good live action adaptation of Daredevil happened. I’ve already mentioned that this has profoundly affected me. The release of Netflix’s Daredevil show roughly coincided with the release of the first trailer forBatman V Superman: Dawn of Justice as well as the discovery of Affleck’s boneheaded attempt to suppress information about a slave owning ancestor from a TV show about his heritage. I was at trivia the other night when the host had a question about this brouhaha, puncuated by a snickering joke about how distraught Ben Affleck must be now that his legacy as Daredevil has been overshadowed.
SO many jokes. Please keep laughing, but know this: Ben Affleck is not the problem with the Daredevil movie. Not even close.
I feel so weird being a Ben Affleck apologist. I have a lot of affection for him from his work in Kevin Smith’s films during my teenage years, but it’s not like I keep up on his oeuvre. It’s just that the hate is too much. At some point in time, it became cool to hate Ben Affleck. Just saying his name became a punchline. However, if you watch that Daredevil movie more than once, you see he’s practically an asset to it.
That being said, there are a couple of things I want to make clear:
1. I wasn’t happy when Affleck was cast in the Daredevil movie. I didn’t think he’d be terrible, but Guy Pearce was rumored at one point and that’s basically how Daredevil looks in my mind.
2. I don’t think this movie is good. It’s not good. I would know. I’ve watched it several times, including the director’s cut.
Thanks to SportsAlcohol.com co-founder Jesse for the necessary research materials
3. I don’t think Ben Affleck is that great of an actor and his performance here isn’t some great revelation. It’s just that he brought his usual steady, workmanlike talent to this and people call it the Affleck Daredevil movie like he’s problem. He’s not! These are the real problems:
[There are spoilers beyond this point, but do you really care?]
Rob is one of the founders of SportsAlcohol.com. He is a recent first time home buyer and it's all he talks about. Said home is in his hometown in Upstate New York. He never moved away and works a job to pay for his mortgage and crippling chicken wing addiction. He is not what you would call a go-getter. This may explain the general tone of SportsAlcohol.com.
I have long loved Daredevil, the blind, Catholic lawyer/superhero. I was excited about the new Netflix series featuring the character and ready to love it for just being better than the Mark Steven Johnson movie. I was not prepared for it to become a commercial and critical hit, but it’s now Netflix’s most popular show and the second most pirated show behind Game of Thrones . Reviews have been very positive, and it’s inspired a lot of great writing about gentrification and urban development. It’s a great time to be a fan of Daredevil.
I’m not one to quibble, but I’m lying I am one to quibble. Quibbling is what I spend most of my free time doing. This whole piece is born of quibbling. There is one type of inevitable blog post that springs up around a successful comic book adaptation and I have found all the ones for Daredevil lacking: the recommended reading list. There isn’t a website around that hasn’t posted a list of Daredevil comics it thinks you should read. These lists are wrong. They are merely a compilation of google searches for well-regarded Daredevil stories. A character with a fifty-plus year history has tons of stories and not all of them will be relevant to fans of the TV show, even if they are critically acclaimed. I love the current Daredevil series written by Mark Waid, but it so tonally different from the show it could be a different character. Why would I put an origin story on the list when Matt Murdoch’s origin has been retold countless times and the show has maybe the best one?
Below I’ve put together a list of stories that embody different aspects of the show’s take on the Daredevil mythos and should appeal to people who watched it without feeling like it’s just drawings of what they just saw. Even this list is imperfect as I can’t find the better stories that highlight Karen Page as a solo character in print anywhere.
You can find most of these stories digitally either on Comixology or through Marvel’s great Unlimited subscription service, but I’m posting amazon affiliate links where available because it’s time we cashed in on how much I care about Daredevil.
So without further ado, the comics you will actually want to read if liked watching Daredevil on Netfilx:
.jpg)
