By now we’ve all seen the trailer for Fox’s upcoming
Gotham television show. If not, here it is:
The trailer, which presumably only contains footage from the pilot as the show had not yet been picked up for a full season (it has since been picked up for thirteen episodes), name drops five famous characters. Five. That means in the pilot we are going to see baby Penguin, baby Catwoman, baby Riddler, baby Poison Ivy, and baby Batman. And I’d bet my house that at some point in the pilot, or at the very least in the first season, we’ll meet baby Two Face, and a kid that likes clowns.
A little fan service is to be expected but this seems like nothing but. The show has the opportunity to do something different in Batman’s universe, to explore the history of Gotham, to turn over some of the stones in the city that have been previously left unturned. Instead, they’ve opted to devote season one to the investigation surrounding the murder of the Waynes. The one story from that period in Gotham’s history we ALREADY KNOW A SHIT TON ABOUT!
It looks like, from the trailer and from the news released behind the scenes,
Gotham is going to be a procedural cop show. Which is understandable as they are cheap and easy to make, and constantly popular with regular television audiences. The twist is that it takes place in a fantasy noir city that is plagued with crime and grants the show a heightened reality where the good guys are troubled and the bad guys are really, really bad. It all takes place years before Bruce Wayne becomes Batman which allows Fox to do almost anything they want, as long as it doesn’t contradict future continuity.
This all sounds great. A relatively cheap show that will have guaranteed interest as it’s associated with an already hugely popular brand name. That’s all Fox needed to hear. Sign on the dotted line. Sold. But then, they started to realise something. Gotham City before Batman is a Gotham without brightly coloured costumed freaks. An Arkham Asylum not stuffed to the rafters with inmates. A Gotham skyline without that famous symbol beamed onto the clouds at night. The show might be cheaper to make without all that, but what is Gotham City without it? What it is... is a fairly typical major city. With added blimps. Once you get passed the name, Gotham City before Batman isn’t all that special. And so the show’s unique selling point becomes pointless.
So how do they get that selling point back? They need Batman. They need Poison Ivy and the Riddler. But it’s a cop procedural, so how can they really use those characters? They can’t. They take all the characters that people already know and love and have them hanging around the sidelines of the plot. Notice how in the trailer the word PENGUIN is huge, but the important word above it is tiny. That word is “before”. The show is telling us: “Hey look, Penguin is in it. But... not really.” “Hey look, there’s Catwoman... sort of.” The premise has backed the show into a corner. It needs the famous characters otherwise the show has no hook, but it takes place in a time before any of those characters are all that interesting. So what we’ll get are hundreds of winks and nods to where these characters eventually end up, without anything actually happening with them in the present of the show. The Penguin will make reference to a coming war, to what the city will be like in the future. Bruce will talk about conquering fear. Selina will walk on all fours. It’s a weak excuse for drama. It’s dancing around existing stories without ever having the space to tell one of its own.
It is both exactly what I feared and expected the show to be.
I hope it proves me wrong. Mainly because Harvey Bullock is my favourite GCPD character (sorry Gordon) and I really dig Donal Logue, especially after his work in
Terriers. If the writing is strong enough, and they find a way to tell some interesting stories without the constant portents and lazy references, then it could still work. But from that trailer alone? I'm more worried they wont, than optimistic they will.