Daredevil and a bunch of other TV shows

As I mentioned previously, I spent most of the weekend burning through Netflix's Daredevil show.  I also watched a season and a half of Eureka from SyFy (ugh, I still hate that branding), twenty straight episodes of The Daily Show and a short-lived NBC offering from 2007 called Journeyman.   Daredevil was easily the best of the bunch.  Holy God, I could not stop watching that show.  I had to force myself to take breaks to eat and do other human things, like feed and walk the dog.  Every single aspect of the show is brilliant and executed perfectly.  Charlie Cox is phenomenal (and has an amazing ass, BTW) as Matt Murdock, a Hell's Kitchen lawyer with lofty motivations and a very dark secret as a masked vigilante.  Blinded in a childhood accident, Matt's other senses have grown to extraordinary proportions, allowing him the kind of reflexes and perceptions to more than make up for his lack of sight.  He and his partner, Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson, the comic heart of this series), start their own firm to stand up for the little guy.  Their first client, a woman named Karen Paige (Deborah Ann Woll, a blonde now instead of redheaded Jessica from TrueBlood), is accused of murder after stumbling into a plot headed by crime lord Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'onofrio).

What I loved (among other things) was how Fisk's villain is handled.  He's not some cartoon character with a rubber face or a one-note bad-for-the-sake-of-plot villain.  He has depth, feeling, real motivations for his actions, and comes alive on screen.  Part of that is great writing and part of that is D'onofrio's ability to show the subtlety of a big man trying to balance a ruthless need for control with a yearning for human connection.  He doesn't just get an origin, he gets a love story.  That's amazing.

I could literally go on for pages about the fight choreography, the symbolism, the supporting cast, the connections to the overall Marvel universe, and how exciting and bold the story decisions were, but I think you should just log on to Netflix and watch it yourself.  Then come tell me and we can gush over it together. 

  It wasn't as vital for me to burn through Eureka as fast as I did Daredevil.  I have seasons 1-4.0 (seasons 3 and 4 were split into two parts each and sold separately) on DVD and I spent the better part of the last month working through 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0.  I had seen all of season three while it was still airing regularly, but I hadn't had a chance to watch season four past the first couple of episodes.  In case you've never heard of it, here's a basic rundown of the plot:  U.S. Marshal Jack Carter (Colin Ferguson) and his daughter Zoe (Jordan Hinson) find themselves in a super-secret town called Eureka, populated almost exclusively by geniuses.  After helping solve a kidnapping, Carter is offered a job as town sheriff and must contend with science run amok.

Season four opens with Jack and four of the main characters getting sent back to the founding of Eureka in 1945.  When they find their way back to the present, things have subtly shifted and they must essentially relearn "their" lives without revealing that they have traveled through time.  Complicating matters is the addition of temporal stowaway Dr. Trevor Grant (James Callis) who snuck out of 1945 so he could see the future and also woo Jack's love interest, Allison Blake (Salli Richardson-Whitfield). 

  Speaking of time travel, last night I finished up a 13-episode run of a show I barely remembered ever existing called Journeyman.  Kevin McKidd stars as Dan Vasser, a San Francisco reporter who suddenly finds himself bouncing through timestreams like a very location-specific Quantum Leap in order to save people.  He is aided by his ex-fiancee (Moon Bloodgood) who can also do the time-jump thing, and hindered by a nagging wife (Gretchen Egolf) and an asshole cop brother (Reed Diamond) who is still in love with Dan's wife.  It got better as the series went on, approaching good even, but layered on way too much of the interpersonal drama between Dan, his ex, his wife, and his brother.  Some of the editing I thought was really nice and I liked the way they used music to tie to a particular year, but it just couldn't get out from under its own weight and was swiftly canceled.  I have it on the server but I don't know how well it will stand up to repeat viewings so it might get deleted eventually.