I need to make this
clear going in: I would never have watched Arrow of my own volition for
many of the reasons I had about comic books going in and will continue to make
clear going forward. The major reason I ended up watching it – and several of
the spin-offs that followed – was because of the raves of close friends of mine
who are infinitely harsher critics of everything than I will ever
be. (I will respect their privacy and not name them.) I think it was around the
fall of 2013, some time after Season 1 of Arrow had finished that I
heard them gushing – that’s basically the only word that comes to mind – about Arrow.
I ended up watching the second season not long after and was a rabid
follower of almost everything Berlanti ended up doing for the CW until roughly
the spring of 2018. As I said to them fairly recently, for that I give them
credit – and that they must also take all the blame.
To be clear, around
2013 I had no use for either comic books entertainment or, for that matter, the
CW. The last series of theirs I had given any attention to was Ringer a
messy but still intriguing mystery drama that marked Sarah Michelle Gellar’s
return to TV, in which she play two very different twins who end up switching
lives. After it was cancelled in the spring of 2012, I had no intention of
having anything more to do with the CW, certainly not for a comic book based
series.
And to be clear, at
that time I was still pretty firm on my idea of comic books providing any true
entertainment in pop culture. I had more or less entirely ignored Phase One of
the MCU, I had ignored every incarnation of the Spiderman series that
had gone on in the past decade, and the only comic books movies I had thought
deserved of the term art were Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy. As I mentioned in the previous article, while
I was considering rewatching Smallville, I had more or less abandoned the show by the
end of Season 6. Even if I was to consider watching a TV adaptation of a comic
book series, they didn’t have a good track record to that point. The most
recent adaptation Constantine had collapsed on NBC after less than a
season, so why would I have anything to do with a character who I only had
heard about through Smallville?
Because at that
point, doing a series about the Green Arrow for television was as crazy an idea
as to try to start a franchise around Iron Man. Both characters may have
had their own comic book series for decades, but at that time both were at best
third string franchises for the company making them. For Marvel, the big names at the time were Spiderman
and The X-Men, and while both had been successful film franchises,
at the beginning of the 2010s both were experiencing varying diminishing
returns. Similarly, the big names for DC were Superman, Batman, and Wonder
Woman. And when even David E. Kelley couldn’t get his pilot adapted for
that version of the latter series, what hope was there for success for a writer’s
whose biggest success to that point was basically family dramas? I’m certain
when the CW developed Arrow they had no idea the phenomenon it would
become; I certainly don’t remember any publicity about it in the fall of 2012.
It wasn’t until well into the next spring that they began to realize what they
had.
I’m relatively
certain that when Greg Berlanti wrote Arrow, he was influenced strongly
by the success of Nolan’s Batman movies. Much of Arrow was focused
in darkness with very few scenes ever shot in broad daylight; Stephen Amell’s Arrow
(he had many variations of his name over time but I’m going to stick with that
for clarity) had a habit of using a much gruffer voice in costume the same way
Christian Bale had done whenever he was Batman. Oliver Queen’s mission was
basically the same as Bruce Wayne’s when he returned to Gotham – he was their
to ‘save his city.” In the first season,
he took on the characteristic of ‘The Hood’ a masked vigilante who killed those
responsible for turning Starling City into a wasteland controlled by the
criminals – which is more or less a mirror for what Gotham was. The longer his mission continued, the more it
became clear that the presence of the Arrow may very well have just been making
Star City worse, and causing a darker element to emerge (the key plot point to The
Dark Knight) as well as the idea that any really victory was a lie (the
precursor to The Dark Knight Rises) As the Arrow, Oliver Queen has a
relationship with a detective named Quentin Lance (Paul Blackthorne was the
only true great thing about Arrow) that mirrors the relationship between Batman
and Jim Gordon in the trilogy. Oliver
Queen has a past relationship with attorney Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy)
mirroring the relationship between Bruce Wayne and Rachel Dawes. (Of course, if
you know the world of the Green Arrow, you know that Laurel Lance has a secret
identity of her own. We’ll get to that). And if that wasn’t enough to make the
point clear, many of the characters and villains who show up throughout the
series have direct ties to Batman. A character
named Huntress shows up in Season 1, Nyssa Al Ghul shows up in Season 2 and is
a recurring presence from that point on, we eventually meet her father Ras and
his other daughter Talia at critical points throughout the rest of the series.
Now I have to admit
that none of this particularly bothered me when I was first watching Arrow during
its peak which I would say lasts roughly from Season to the end of Season
4. If anything, the ties to the world of
Batman gave me something I could hang my hat on when I failed to
comprehend so many of the other DC references that were going on around me. I
knew who Amanda Waller was and what the Suicide Squad was only because of what
I had seen on Smallville and that’s the only reason I had a hint of who
Deathstroke was. That is the only reason I knew that Laurel Lance would end up
becoming the Black Canary, which was hinted at when her sister Sara appeared
using the eventually label the White Canary. And of course when Barry Allen
showed up in January of 2014 (by this point I was loyally following the series)
I knew very well who he was and what was going to happen to him even if I hadn’t
known that Berlant was using this as a back-door pilot for The Flash. (I’ll
get to that too, trust me.)
I was engaged in Arrow
far less for the comic book easter eggs which I frankly could have taken or
left and more or less the human drama part of it, which was critically for Season
2 through 4. When Oliver was forced to choose between the lives of his sister and
his mother at the hands of Deathstroke – and his mother chose to sacrifice
herself – that was one of the most gut-wrenching deaths I had seen on
television to that point. Coming up on top
of a series of shocking deaths in the fall of 2013 and the winter of 2014 –
Carter on Person of Interest, Will Gardner on The Good Wife and
Richard Harrow on Boardwalk Empire -
watching that was one of the best moments of the 2010s.
And Arrow worked,
when it did, when it was at its most human. Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards) was one of
the most beloved characters of the 2010s. Essentially Team Arrow’s equivalent
of Chloe O’Brian from 24 or Marshall from Alias – except of course,
she was also hot – I found her wonderful to watch throughout the series, even
when it was starting to slight. I rarely ship when I am watching any television
series, I know I will probably get my heart my broken, but God help me I so
shipped Oliver and Felicity when I was watching Arrow. There was something beautiful about this
between the relationship between the hero and tech support that I could not
resist, and every time they were put through the ringer – which as anyone who
watched the series knows happened every season until the end – I prayed they
would come out okay.
Some have rejected
the idea at the core of so many of the Arrow-verse shows – the fact that all of
these heroes, basically lone wolves in the comics – have teams, something that
is a pure Berlanti invention. I have a feeling that Berlanti and his writers
were trying to come up with some kind of mix between what was going on with The
Avengers on film and everything Joss Whedon did on Buffy and Angel.
(Whedon was still considered God by just about every TV writer to that
point.) I actually didn’t find this objectional because, again, I knew nothing
about the comics and because I was more interested in the people side of it.
Not necessarily the romances outside of Arrow – I never truly bought in
to the Barry Allen-Iris West romance on Flash or any of the
relationships on Supergirl - but
I am more interesting, at my core, in human drama than any accuracy to canon.
This is also why, fundamentally, I did not object to so much of the race and sexuality-changing
of so many of the characters in Berlanti’s version of them. I didn’t care if
Iris West and Jimmy Olsen were black, that Sara Lance was bisexual or that Alex
Danvers (Kara’s sister) would come out of the closet in Season 2. I don’t deny
that for many of them it became increasingly heavy-handed, but I didn’t object
vehemently to it.
And I initially thought
very highly of many of these series, certainly Arrow and Flash. IN
2014, I put both series on my top ten list as a single entry, and I would
regularly suggest members of both casts (particularly Blackthorne and Tom
Cavanaugh for The Flash) for Emmy nominations. But over time, flaws began
to become clear that would eventually cause me to abandon both of these series
and by extension, everything Berlanti did.
I have to tell you
that both of those fundamental flaws may have come to the fact that Berlanti
was basically leaning too hard in to several of my least favorite comic
book tropes. I’ll start with the most
obvious one: no one stays dead.
As any youth of a certain
age remembers, one of the most mind blowing comic book arcs came with the Death
of Superman in 1991. The image of Lois Lane cradling Superman’s body as well as
DC heroes standing over Superman’s coffin are among the most powerful of my
memories as a child. But as any comic book fan knows, they didn’t stick with
it. There will several ‘replacement’ Supermans for a period and then, less than
two years later, Superman and Clark Kent, were back from the dead as if nothing
had happened.
I sometimes
considered comic books little more than soap operas where all the leads wore
masks. And just as in soap operas, no one stays dead. The warning signs that the world of Berlanti
was not going to be immune to this came early in Season 4 of Arrow. In Season 3, Sara Lance had been murdered
in the season premiere and the consequences of that death were the starting
point for basically the entire season. But early in Season 4, Laurel exhumed
her sister’s body and took her to the Lazarus Pits to be resurrected. She came
back messed up, but thanks to John Constantine (you don’t want to know) she was
fine a few episodes later and leading her own-spinoff series that spring. (I
will deal with Legends of Tomorrow in
due time, trust me.)
I should have been
prepared based on what happened in the first season of The Flash. Through
most of that season, Barry Allen became aware that Harrison Wells (Cavanaugh)
the man who had been mentoring him, was actually Eobert Thawne, another
speedster from far into the future who had killed Barry’s mother as a child and
had arranged for the particle accelerator explosion that officially turned
Barry into the Flash. The season finale was a true masterpiece as Barry
traveled through time to save his mother but chose not to defeat the ‘Reverse
Flash’. Just as the Reverse Flash was about to kill him, Eddie Thawne, a
distant ancestor of him killed himself in order to erase the Reverse Flash from
the timeline. It was one of the great moments I’d seen on TV in 2015.
But by the second
season of the series, it became clear the Reverse Flash wasn’t gone from the
picture. Barry would travel through time to battle him; he eventually became a
villain on Legends of Tomorrow and has since resurfaced on several subsequent
seasons of The Flash (so I’m told).
I may not be a fan of
the slaughter of characters that has made Peak TV simultaneously brilliant and excruciating,
but at the very least I do respect the writers for sticking with the decision to
kill them off. Say what you will about the mass slaughter that populated every
season of Game of Thrones; when George R.R. Martin killed you stayed
dead. (Yes, yes, except for Jon Snow; can we just acknowledge the overarching
point?) If we’re supposed to accept that the death of a character is important
than stick with it. The final episode of Arrow ended with Oliver
Queen sacrificing himself and every character who died during the course of
the series coming back to life at his funeral. Honestly, I liked it better
when Lost did the same trick a decade earlier: at least they acknowledged
everybody had died. (Yes, I have issues with that too; can we stick with Berlanti?)
This meant that their deaths were
meaningless along the way, but hell, this was a comic book series, death doesn’t
count for squat.
This actually gets me
to the second and equally galling point with every series in Berlanti’s world I
watched. They followed the comic book trope that no matter what seismic changes
are promised, the status quo will always be maintained. I’d say Berlanti made
this worse in a sense because he would do the same basic season long
arc.
This was clear in
Seasons 5 and 6 of Arrow in particular. There is a major threat facing
Oliver Queen. He concentrates on building a new team. A new villain arises. He
goes out of his way to isolate himself slowly but surely from everybody he
cares about. The villain puts everybody’s life in mortal danger. But everything’s
back to normal by the start of the next season.
The ways the writer’s
did could be galling. I’m not sure in retrospect what was worse: ending Season
5 by blowing up the island Oliver had learned his skills (sort of, we really
don’t need to go in to that) with all the people he loved on it – and the next
season, it turned out the only people to die were the villains or Season
6, where Oliver Queen did everything
possible to prevent the world from learning his true identity – including giving
the mantle of the Arrow to his ally John Diggle for a time – and ending the
season by telling the world that he was the Green Arrow. Hell, he didn’t even
manage to kill off the lead villain in the finale like he usually did.
It was actually worse
in Season 2, which was in retrospect a mirror of Season 1 of The Flash. Barry Allen meets a former speedster
calling himself Jay Garrick (yes, I know that’s the Flash in a different
universe) claiming there is a great threat that will put everybody in danger.
He spends Season 2 learning what that threat is – big surprise, the villain in
the man calling himself ‘Garrick’ – and he ends up in another battle with him
destroying him. Oh, and as added bonus Garrick ends up killing Barry’s father
in the penultimate episode – the man he's spent his entire life trying to get
out of prison and only managed to do in the season premiere.
It was the constant
repetitiveness of the same arcs combined with nothing ever changing (until this
point I actually thought Shonda Rhimes was the biggest abuser of it) that led me
to throw up my hands and abandon all-things Berlanti in the spring of 2018.
Unfortunately, by this point the CW was more or less Team Berlanti, a factor
that has done more damage to it than anything else.
Because I am an equal
opportunity critic, I will follow up on this with another article. I will
explain what I think the Berlanti-verse managed to do right in many of the
other comic book based shows and how their relative success may have led to the
continued existence of the two genuine diamonds to exist within the CW’s run.
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