Thirty-six years ago today, I sat down in front of a television to watch a superhero show that looked like there was real money behind it. The suit looked like it came straight from the comic book and I was SUPER excited!
The Flash premiered on CBS on September 20th, 1990, with a two-hour pilot. It ran 22 episodes and that was the end of it.
John Wesley Shipp played Barry Allen. Amanda Pays played Tina McGee. Alex Desert played Julio Mendez.
Tim Burton's Batman changed what a comic book adaptation could look like in 1989, and you can see it all over The Flash. Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo developed it. Bilson put it bluntly to Susan King of the Los Angeles Times in September 1990: "You can't, after Batman, have a guy running around in tights."
Dave Stevens, the man who created The Rocketeer, designed the suit that sold CBS on the look. Robert Short supervised the build and Stan Winston Studios fabricated it. Short told CBR they wanted it to look like the comic with no visible seams, which they pulled off with overlapping foam appliances and electrostatic flocking.
Four complete suits that added up to $100,000!
Danny Elfman wrote the main title theme. He'd scored Batman the year before. Shirley Walker scored the episodes themselves for full orchestra, and she'd go on to run the music on Batman: The Animated Series about a year and a half later. Elfman and Walker on one CBS drama… Who would have thought?!
The two-hour pilot is widely reported as costing $6 million, with episodes after it averaging around $1.6 million. That's an enormous amount for network television in the 1990s.
I'm hedging those numbers a little... Four sites have reported them as "around" or "averaging," and none of them come from trade reports in 1990. There's a competing $1.5 million per-episode number out there too. The scale is right, but I wouldn't swear to the exact figures… Regardless, it was among the most expensive television shows at the time.
CBS put it on Thursday nights opposite The Cosby Show on NBC and The Simpsons on Fox, then slid it to 8:30 after the second episode. That's a lot to throw at a brand new superhero show!
Then they moved it off Thursdays entirely, over to Saturday nights. According to JoBlo, the moves came without warnings to viewers.
As if moving nights wasn't enough to deal with, it kept getting pre-empted, first for the World Series and the baseball playoffs, then for Gulf War coverage.
And it was holding a 16 share while all that was going on, which was respectable for CBS at the time even with Cosby and The Simpsons winning the hour.
As for why it ended, the cleanest account I found is at 13th Dimension: to get a second season the producers were told to cut the budget, and they refused. Bilson himself has pointed at network politics: he said he'd heard an executive's bonus was tied to ratings share points, and that the guy "traded our 16 for a show that had a 17."
The last episode aired May 18th, 1991. It was called "The Trial of the Trickster."
Hamill played James Montgomery Jesse in two episodes, "The Trickster" in February and the finale in May, both directed by Bilson. That was about a year and a half before he first voiced the Joker on Batman: The Animated Series. On why he got cast, he told CBR: "I know why they cast me: Because he's literally a 'sky walker'."
Most cancelled shows stop there, but this one kept going for another three decades.
When The CW launched The Flash in 2014, they cast Shipp as Henry Allen, Barry's father. He stayed with that show on and off from 2014 all the way to 2023.
Amanda Pays came back too, as a reimagined Tina McGee, across five episodes. Mark Hamill came back as the Trickster. They were rebuilding the 1990 cast one at a time and most viewers had no idea!
Zoom killed Henry in season 2. Then, in that same season's finale, they removed the mask from the Man in the Iron Mask and it was Shipp again, this time as Jay Garrick, the Flash of Earth-3. He described that one as his Barry roughly 25 years later. We covered his thinking on that at the time.
In the "Elseworlds" crossover in December 2018, Shipp showed up as Barry Allen of Earth-90. That canonized the 1990 series itself as an actual Earth in the multiverse. Costume designer Kate Main rebuilt the Short suit, working from the original pulled out of the Warner Bros. archive. We ran the behind-the-scenes image when it leaked.
A year later, in Crisis on Infinite Earths Part Three, they killed him. The Monitor had said the Flash must die and never said which one, so Barry-90 took the speed Grant Gustin's Barry gave him and ran himself to death on the Cosmic Treadmill to take out the antimatter cannon. The show gave Shipp the death Barry Allen got in the 1985 comic.
They even cut in a flashback of him with Tina McGee, using actual footage from the 1990 show. His life flashes before his eyes and it's literally his old series.
So in December 2019, nearly thirty years after the 1990 premiere, the same actor in a rebuild of the same suit got to close out the same character, in front of an audience that mostly knew him as somebody's dad. Showrunner Eric Wallace said they were completing a 30-year arc, and he wasn't exaggerating!
It does make me wonder though, where this show would have gone if CBS had renewed it for a second season… not to mention what type of superhero shows and movies we would have today if it had continued. I don't know if the math even works with 1991 network budgets. $1.6 million in 1991 works out to close to $4 million in 2026, and that's per episode.
How did you first see The Flash? Did you stick with it for all 22 episodes? Did you come to it backwards through Earth-90?
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