Ever since he started doing press at the 2018 New York Comic Con earlier this month, Daredevil season 3 showrunner Erik Oleson has been saying that he modeled his story for the show on The Sopranos. Numerous interviews published since then have highlighted this fact, but as The Man in the High Castle and Arrow alum told Metro, he really means it.
“I wanted to do a number of things,” Oleson says. “I wanted to tell a story that was somewhere between season one of this show and The Sopranos. I’m not turning anybody into Tony Soprano, but what I mean by that is that this is written from the inside out. We’re in the shoes of the characters. We’re being emotionally honest. We’re treating the characters as if they are the hero of their own storylines.”
If he’s not trying to turn Matt Murdock, Wilson Fisk or any of the show’s other characters into the next Tony Soprano, then what does Oleson really mean by his constant comparisons to the HBO classic?
“I very much wanted to tell a grounded, twisty, turny conspiracy thriller using these iconic characters,” he explains. “I had a number of goals for what I wanted to do with the show after I’d had some initial conversations with Jeph Loeb and Marvel. They already knew they wanted to have Fisk back before I was apart of the family, and they had some ideas about that, but they also gave me a lot of freedom to go off and shape it.”
Showrunner Erik Oleson talks The Sopranos influence on Daredevil season 3
Aside from the constant comparisons to David Chase’s inaugural “peak TV” drama, Oleson is quick to compare his being given “the keys to the Ferrari” to what is already a standard practice in the comics industry. That is to say, various characters and titles will often be handled by a particular author (or authors) for a predetermined run, before the property is picked up by someone else.
Steven S. DeKnight spearheaded the first season of Daredevil, while Doug Petrie and Marco Ramirez served as season two’s showrunners. As the latest season’s showrunner, Oleson compares the experience to doing his own run of Daredevil comics.
“I very much wanted to make the show my own, in the same way that Frank Miller had his run in the comics,” he says. “I wanted to be able to treat season three as my run of the show, even while I was picking up with story threads that were previously established. Marvel is incredibly supportive of that kind of approach.”
“I just came in and said that I loved the show, but I wanted to do it the way I wanted to do it. I had a different storytelling sense than the other showrunners, and Marvel was insanely supportive.”
Daredevil season 3 streams Friday on Netflix.
