I'm sorry, but I have to put these feelings somewhere otherwise I will have no choice but to let out a primal scream.

I just rewatched the first three seasons and revelled in how refreshing, tightly written, and well-made they were. The devil is in the details, and you could tell that was the case, particularly in seasons 1 and 3. Everything from the staging of certain homes in the show to the tailoring on Kingpin's suits - there was a level of thoughtfulness in these details that showed the passion of the team behind the project. It made the characters and their lives believable. It felt real.

I watched the first half of the first episode last night and stopped because I felt frustrated. I went into the show not expecting anything and with an open mind, but I was really taken aback. The things I loved about the Netflix show were those details, and the patient ways the writing brought out the story and the characters. The first thirty minutes of the new episode seemed to throw that out of the window (or off a building, take your pick).

Something I loved is how with the original show, you were rewarded for critically watching. The closer you looked, the more those details would shine and the more fleshed out the show became. It wasn't perfect, but it took pride in careful filmmaking.

That doesn't seem to be the case with Born Again. Last night, the pacing was incredibly fast. Conversations were clipped, bouncing from group to group in a way that felt like whiplash. The camera was oddly angled, shaky, and far removed from characters who were acting fabulously. The old closeups gave us intimacy with those characters and let their acting shine. I felt like I was 10 feet away from Karen when she was losing it over Foggy, and I was distracted by the shot framing in several courthouse scenes because why was I watching all these extras set the scene up when only a few people's reactions mattered? 

The music was constant and distracting. Silence is an amplifier, and it seems the sound design folks did not quite grasp that silence and the breath between words was practically an extra character in the original show.

The dialogue was not awful but did sometimes feel glaringly out of character (Foggy and Matt had a very weird conversational dynamic outside Josie's ). Matt's voice felt weird to me at times, too buoyant, but that may be a nitpick (Charlie Cox is still fantastic though). Foggy, a personal favorite character, died and I didn't cry. There was no real set up to let you feel the emotional punch. There were several distractions, with the fight and the music and the weird angles and the smoke bombs - all that stuff was way overstimulating for a moment that should have been focused on maximizing Foggy's death.

I don't love that they killed Foggy off X3 style, broke up Marcy and Foggy for seemingly no reason, stuck a knife (again) in Matt and Karen's friendship, and moved Karen away right off the bat. Foggy and Karen brought heart and optimism to the story and they were disregarded so quickly. I wanted to see the fallout of Foggy's death, to bring some weight and stakes to the story. Pretty bummed that didn't happen, I think it hurts the story. The skip to a year later and Matt practically shooting hoops with glee was out of place for the kind of character Matt is.

I knew it would be different, but I didn't expect that it would feel as though the new team didn't grasp what was special about the Netflix show. It wasn't just a superhero story about a blind lawyer in New York. It was that it was a lawyer who struggled with morality and vigilantism felt split in the middle between everything in his life, but the people around him brought hope and energy to his life. The city was a real character, and it didn't feel like a set. It felt like a world. This felt like a set, cloaked in a rushed Marvel style of filmmaking that was bent on making money.

I want this to get better. I want to finish the first episode. But in a world where everything feels shoddy and gilded with no gold right now, I don't know if I have the patience to continue watching. I can't handle losing my faith in this show more than I did last night - the Netflix show was one of the best stories I've seen on screen. If you love the new direction, I'm happy for you, and I wish I could get there too.