Contrary to all the hype and box-office receipts, not everyone swoons for superheroes. The more super-serious these costumed lifesavers get, the more silly they usually seem. Attach a Marvel or DC logo to a new TV show or movie and some of us brace for metaphors laid on too thickly, overblown special effects and blunt, gravelly dialogue that trips over its desire for portent.

All of that is present in Netflix’s elegant and hyperviolent new 13-episode series “Marvel’s Daredevil” (which began streaming Friday), but it’s also clear that someone’s fiddling with the knobs — someone who possesses a true desire to at last find the right tone for these things. Will there ever be a comic-book-based TV show that will appease fans of the genre while also appealing to discerning viewers who prefer dramas such as “Breaking Bad” and “The Americans”?

Let’s put it another way: Can there ever be a superhero-themed equivalent to “Game of Thrones”?

That still feels a long ways off, but “Daredevil,” the first of several Marvel projects for Netflix, shows some impressive instinct for elevating the form, some of which it cribs from Christopher Nolan’s dark-hearted “Batman” films and maybe just a smidge from the look and feel of Fox’s “Gotham.”

All of these projects rely heavily on a long-outdated notion of a Manhattan (or any Gotham-like metropolis) that’s so thoroughly corrupt and crime-ridden that the city needs heroes whose moral ambivalence pushes them toward vigilantism. Without this deeply cynical premise, the comic-to-film process simply falls apart. Superheroes need bad guys, and lots of ’em.

Thus we have “Daredevil’s” excessively high body count, which is not merely a function of adult-themed television; it’s true to the comics too, dating back 30-plus years to Frank Miller’s provocative work on the “Daredevil” title, delivering so much brutality and grace with spattered black ink and revolutionizing the medium. This “Daredevil” TV series honors Miller’s early vision for comics as cinematic noir.

Charlie Cox (“Boardwalk Empire”) stars as Matthew Murdock, a New York attorney and son of a boxer. Blinded as a boy (he pushed a good citizen out of the way of a careening truck loaded with chemical waste), Matt discovers his other senses have heightened considerably. Now he can hear just about everything, from cries for help to individual heartbeats, happening in the blocks surrounding Hell’s Kitchen. (“Daredevil” smartly contains its story to a neighborhood, rather than a planet.) He’s also an exceptionally agile martial-arts fighter and quite the parkour expert, leaping and bouncing up the sides of buildings.

“Daredevil” insists, however, that we view Matt as human. This is in keeping with the overall plan for future Netflix series which will feature Marvel’s so-called “street-level” protagonists — superheroes who can’t fly, morph, shoot spider webs from their wrists, etc. Like DC’s Batman, they are prone to grievous injury and they are at least somewhat familiar with the laws of physics.

When he dons his improvised costume (including pulling a hood down to his nose) and sets out each night to rid his neighborhood of international thugs, dealers and human-traffickers, Matt gets his butt kicked more times that you can count in the first five episodes. Cox is a fine actor but he’s a hard fit as a rough-and-tumble vigilante; his best assets as an actor — his eyes — are usually obscured, either by Matt’s daytime sunglasses or Daredevil’s mask. Disappointingly, Cox winds up being just another guy in a TV show.

Rosario Dawson plays a nurse, Claire, who shares Matt’s vision for a saner Hell’s Kitchen (“Daredevil” all but ignores recent gentrification in the actual Hell’s Kitchen) and patches him up so he doesn’t have to visit the ER and risk revealing his identity. And Vincent D’Onofrio (“Law & Order: Criminal Intent”) is a convincingly sinister presence as Wilson Fisk, a crime boss obsessed with improving New York by killing most everyone in it. (In one scene, he pulps a traitorous colleague’s head by slamming it repeatedly in a car door.)

So much about “Marvel’s Daredevil” works exactly the way it’s intended, including the pace of the action and the extent and style of the gore. What still doesn’t work — what almost never works where the name Marvel and live-action film/TV meet — is the hammy dialogue, especially when characters express their feelings to one another.

When Claire questions Matt’s propensity for violence and his remark that he hurts people because he enjoys it, the words, as Gloria Estefan once sang, get in the way: “I can’t believe that, because if I do, that means you’re not the man I believe you to be,” she says.

“I need to be the man this city needs,” Matt whispers, gruffly. “What do you want me to do, Claire — let them tear Hell’s Kitchen apart? Let them win?”

“I just don’t think I can let myself fall in love with someone who is so damn close to becoming what he hates,” she says.