With Marvel’s ‘Daredevil,’ Netflix Looks to Build Its Own Superteam

In the pantheon of Marvel Comics, Daredevil might not be the first superhero you’d turn to in a bind.

He doesn’t have the high-tech arsenal of Iron Man or the godlike might of Thor. His few attempts to transcend comic books include an uninspiring appearance in a 1989 “Incredible Hulk” TV-movie and the starring role in a misbegotten 2003 film starring Ben Affleck.

But this neglected champion — New York lawyer by day; vigilante and martial artist by night — has become vitally important to Marvel’s latest ambitions to take its characters from page to screen.

On Friday, Netflix will release all 13 episodes of the first season of “Daredevil,” starring Charlie Cox (“Boardwalk Empire”) as Matt Murdock, the victim of a childhood accident that blinded him but gave him extrasensory powers.

In the following months and years, Netflix will add three more shows based on the Marvel characters Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist. All are street-level crime fighters like Daredevil who operate in Hell’s Kitchen, the rough-and-tumble Midtown Manhattan district that is home to immigrants, ruffians and recent college graduates.

Then, a mini-series, “The Defenders,” will unite these characters into a superteam.

It is a strategy that Marvel and Netflix hope will duplicate the success of “The Avengers,” the blockbuster franchise that combined the characters (and box-office prosperity) of movies featuring Iron Man, Thor and Captain America — although success here will not be as easily ascertained, because Netflix never releases its viewership numbers.

A Hulk-sized smash is hardly guaranteed: The characters in “The Defenders” are not nearly as familiar as those presented by Marvel in its films. And each television series, containing many more hours of story than a movie, must stand on its own for the whole enterprise to work.

“It was a giant gamble, because if any one of those should happen to go awry, you have to still remain committed,” said Jeph Loeb, Marvel’s head of television and an executive producer of “Daredevil.”

After “The Avengers” was released in 2012, Marvel surveyed its roster of costumed characters, looking for potential television projects. In particular, Daredevil and his New York allies seemed well equipped for smaller-scale conflicts. As Mr. Loeb put it, “If the Avengers are here to save the universe, these heroes are here to save the neighborhood.”

There was nothing small, however, about the size of Marvel’s pitch: It wanted an upfront order of all five series, without pilot episodes. That approach seemed to rule out broadcast networks like ABC, which, like Marvel, is owned by Walt Disney, and which carries other Marvel series, like the espionage adventure “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” (After a widely watched debut in the fall of 2013, “S.H.I.E.L.D.” has cooled off in its second season, drawing about 4 million to 5 million live viewers an episode.)

Netflix, the streaming video service, had started its political thriller “House of Cards” with a two-season guarantee, and was willing to make an even bigger commitment to the “Defenders” project.

Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, said of striking the deal with Marvel, “We were taking what I thought was a pretty measured bet on someone with a great track record of serving a very discriminating fan base.”

Mr. Sarandos said that he was drawn to the characters Marvel was offering because “these were all nonconventional heroes — really grounded, not capes and codpieces.”

“Daredevil,” adapted from the comics series Marvel introduced in 1964, takes its inspiration primarily from the character’s post-1980s publication history, when writers and illustrators like Frank Miller, Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev helped define him as a hard-boiled hero in a world overwhelmed by corruption and crime.

The “Daredevil” show runner, Steven S. DeKnight, explained the protagonist’s central conflict: “Will he be a young man who will grow up to solve the world’s problems as a lawyer, or to solve them with his fists?”

Mr. DeKnight, who previously created the Starz action series “Spartacus,” joined “Daredevil” a few months before filming began, when its original show runner, Drew Goddard, left the project. (Mr. DeKnight, who worked with Mr. Goddard on shows including “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel,” said the parting was amicable.)

Although his initiation into the series was somewhat rapid, Mr. DeKnight said the Netflix model allowed “Daredevil” to spend an entire season gradually unpacking the origins of its characters.

“When you’re working on a network show, especially a pilot, the notes you get are, basically, ‘Cram the entire first season into that first episode, so everybody knows what they’re going to get,’ ” he said.

On Netflix, Mr. DeKnight said: “It really is the exact opposite. It’s more, ‘Slow things down, let it breathe, explore it.’ ”

The Netflix model also means that subsequent episodes don’t have to spend time recapitulating what happened in previous installments. “We had a brief discussion about it,” he said, “and decided: ‘Eh, why does that matter? People are going to binge-watch this.’ ”

Mr. DeKnight said that the first season of “Daredevil” was as much a chronicle of Matt Murdock’s first adventures as a story about Wilson Fisk (played by Vincent D’Onofrio), a fearsome crime boss better known to readers of the comics as the Kingpin. Other prominent characters from the Daredevil comics, like the ninja assassin Elektra or the mercenary Bullseye, could appear “sometime in the far-flung future — I’m not saying it’s Season 2, or 3 or 4 or even 5,” he said.

For the moment, Netflix is being stealthy about how many seasons it will give to “Daredevil” and its other Marvel shows, and when exactly they will unite in “The Defenders.” (Marvel is also being coy about whether characters from these new TV shows will appear in its next crop of movies, although Mr. Loeb said these worlds “do intersect in very specific ways.”)

“We’re definitely going to roll out each of the characters one at a time, with their own series,” Mr. Sarandos said. “Then you can determine which of those series will go to multiple seasons, and then the coming-together season would be after all the characters are rolled out.”

He added, “It’s complicated but doable.”

Mr. Cox said he was committed to his character for a good long while.

“I think I’ll be playing Daredevil well into my 90s, if they’ll have me,” he said. “I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather be doing. Maybe speak to me again when I’m 70 and see if I feel that way.”

Superheroes With History

Daredevil is just the first of four characters who will each have a series on Netflix before assembling in a fifth show. The other three names are not as well known. Here are their stories:

JESSICA JONES This superstrong, super-resilient private eye gained her uncanny abilities from a childhood car accident that exposed her to dangerous chemicals. She had her debut in the 2001 comic book Alias (no relation to the ABC television series of the same name with Jennifer Garner), which established her as a detective, although she has also been a costumed character called Jewel, a newspaper reporter and a member of the Avengers. In Netflix’s “A.K.A. Jessica Jones,” she will be played by Krysten Ritter, whose own superpower is overcoming the cruel cancellation of her sitcom “Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23.”

LUKE CAGE The star of the 1970s comic series “Luke Cage, Hero for Hire” can trace his origins partly to a cell-regeneration experiment gone wrong, and partly to an era of hit blaxploitation films like “Shaft” and “Superfly,” upon which Marvel was trying to capitalize. A Harlem-born gang member and former prison inmate (later acquitted of the drug charges for which he was framed), Cage was made to voice his share of stereotypical dialogue and the catchphrase “Sweet Christmas” in his earliest adventures. He’s now a member of the Avengers and a mainstay of the Marvel universe. He will be played by Mike Colter (Lemond Bishop on “The Good Wife”).

IRON FIST An ill-fated expedition seeking the mythical city of K’un-L’un cost the life of his father, but it delivered young Danny Rand to the care of the master martial artist Lei-Kung the Thunderer, who set him on the path to becoming the masked hero Iron Fist. That all probably made more sense in 1974, when the character was introduced in the comics series Marvel Premiere amid a craze for martial arts-themed movies (“Enter the Dragon”) and TV shows (“Kung Fu”). He was paired with Luke Cage in the comic series Power Man and Iron Fist, which ended in 1986 with Rand’s apparent death. But Rand bounced back and even filled in for Daredevil for a time in the comics. No casting for the Netflix show has been announced.

THE DEFENDERS Contrary to the polished sheen and likability of the Avengers, this other squad of Marvel adventurers (which made its first appearance in the 1971 series Marvel Feature) was designed to accommodate outcasts that no sensible superheroes would want on their teams: the brooding and dangerous Hulk; the sulky Sub-Mariner; the incomprehensible Dr. Strange, master of the mystic arts. The lineup of the Defenders has changed many times. Its pariah status has also been reinforced by the fact that Defenders comics have been canceled at least four times since 1986.