As 2018 wraps up, movie and TV fans find themselves often reflecting on the year in entertainment, and what really stood out as being novel, unexpected, or just plain awesome. To help put our own spin on the year-end tallies, the staff here at ComicBook.com put our heads together to once again come up with the Golden Issue Awards, to celebrate the best in movies, TV, comics, anime, games, and everything else great in fan culture during 2018.
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Now the winners of our 2018 Golden Issue Awards have been selected from the impressive lists of nominees, and we’re here to announce who won the 2018 Golden Issue Award for Best TV Hero!
In 2018, television provided fans with more superhero characters than ever to root for, which made the competition for a winner more fierce than ever. New additions like Marvel‘s Cloak & Dagger gave us two impressive young breakout leads in Aubrey Joseph and Olivia Holt, while shows like Netflix’s Iron Fist gave big superhero promotions to former supporting characters like Jessica Henwick’s Colleen Wing. More than anything else though, it was a year that saw some veteran superhero actors get to step their game up, like Caity Lotz did to become the true center of her Legends of Tomorrow team. In the end, though, the biggest standout from the bunch was a hero who was looking to get back to his glory days — and rose to that challenge better than anyone could have ever expected.
And the winner of Best TV Hero is…
Charlie Cox as Daredevil in Daredevil Season Three!
Daredevil was the show that first expanded the possibilities of what a Marvel Cinematic Universe TV series could be. It came to Netflix like a bat out of hell, offering a darker and grittier superhero action/drama experience than anything fans expected from the MCU. It also started major Marvel Netflix trends like the famous “hallway fight” sequences.
Unfortunately, after a groundbreaking first season, Daredevil seemed to lose its footing in Season Two despite having the added star power of introducing Jon Bernthal’s Punisher to the MCU. The season’s convoluted storyline of The Hand ninjas, the Punisher, and Daredevil‘s love interest Elektra was nowhere near as thrilling as it should’ve been, which was a major missed opportunity for the show, and arguably the start of Marvel Netflix’s decline. Things only got worse for Daredevil in The Defenders crossover, as fans were annoyed it took Matt Murdock so long to fully suit up and get down to business.
Daredevil Season Three was touted as a major heel-turn designed to get the show back on track, and it achieves that goal in spectacular fashion. The show brought Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin back into the limelight, and added fan-favorite Daredevil nemesis Bullseye to the mix. However, even with all that impressive villain presence filling out the season, Charlie Cox managed to keep the third season centered on Matt Murdock’s struggle to get over his near-death experience and reclaim his purpose as a vigilante crimefighter. Cox put serious physicality and stunt work into sequences like the prison riot hallway fight, or Daredevil’s two big battles with Bullseye, while also carrying serious dramatic weight in scenes like losing his mentor Father Lantom, or discovering the hard truth about his mother, Sister Maggie. Scenes with Matt Murdock finally getting to confront Wilson Fisk in a bloody brawl more than made up for their lackluster fight in Season One, covering all bases for Cox’s big Daredevil comeback.
Unfortunately, all the work he put in only resulted in Netflix cancelling Daredevil for good. But maybe a Golden Issue Award will be a comforting consolation?
List of Nominees:
- Daredevil (Charlie Cox) – Daredevil [WINNER]
- Black Lightning (Cress Williams) – Black Lightning
- Cloak and Dagger (Aubrey Joseph and Olivia Holt) – Cloak & Dagger
- Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick) – Iron Fist
- Sarah Lance (Caity Lotz) – Legends of Tomorrow
