Gotham TV Series
Trundling around the net, and I stumble across numerous sites quoting an interview with Fox exec Kevin Reilly. Now, before you prepare your rotten fruit to hurl at him (for that is usually the appropriate response to meeting a Fox exec), Reilly is the man responsible for bringing The Following, Fringe, and Glee to Fox and My Name Is Earl, Heroes, 30 Rock, and Friday Night Lights to NBC, so he’s no slouch when it comes to picking interesting TV series. In the interview Reilly talks about a number of Fox’s upcoming projects, however there was one bit where he’s discussing the new show ‘Gotham‘ they have in the works (based in DC Comic’s Gotham City), which piqued my interest…
“This is all of the classic Batman characters, with a young Bruce Wayne, with Detective Gordon before he’s Commissioner Gordon, with the Penguin, with the Riddler, and with the Joker… …And we will arc a young Bruce Wayne from a child into the final episode of the series, when he will put on the cape.”
He goes on to explain how these will be proto-villains – early version’s of characters we know before they really formed into the villains we’ve come to ‘love’. I don’t have that much of an issue with creating origin stories for a lot of these characters. After all, Penguin is often shown as an older guy, and well connected mobster, it would be interesting to see how he gets to that point. Or how the Riddler became obsessed with riddles. The one that he mentions that does bother me is Joker… One of the recurring themes in the comic books that many of these villains wouldn’t actually exist without Batman, but that fact never really rings more true where the Joker is concerned. Joker can’t exist without Batman. There is also the issue that Gotham is going to have Gotham PD presumably manage to stop every Batman villain under the sun, which if they could do, would effectively negate the need to have Batman in the first place wouldn’t it? ;)
I do try not to pre-judge shows, especially when there isn’t even a scene shot yet, but as a huge DC Comics and Batman fan, I’m preying they manage to pull this off, as it’s an ambitious task. I will also be interested to see if this will somehow fold into the wider DC universe. With the new movie coming out, Arrow doing so well on the small screen, and a Flash series potentially in development, you’d hope they’d somehow manage to tie everything together… but I get the feeling that won’t be the case. It does somewhat bother me that despite Marvel having issues with the rights of their characters been sold to the 4 corners of Hollywood, they still manage to have a far more coherent universe than DC, who have control of all their characters, but seem happier to fracture their world into tiny parts…
Whatever happens, Fox have already committed a series order to Gotham, so I’d expect the US will get it in the Autumn (Fall) season.
