A Geeky Viewpoint

Adam West as Batman

I am an old school Batman fan.  <Pow> You know the Adam West as Bruce Wayne/Batman, the 3 time Emmy nominated TV show from 1966-68.  <Kapow>  So your mileage may very when it comes to this review. <zing>

On a side note if you ever want to watch an interesting movie on the backstory, issues and shannigans, of a Parody of 1960's tv show, might I suggest watching Return to the Batcave: The Misadventures of Adam and Burt.  

So with my preamble out of the way, time to dig into Fox's Gotham.


Fox ordered 6 episodes of Gotham with a option for an additional 10 episodes for this TV season.  Its a standard operating procedure now-a-days in Hollywood. 

The first show was watched by 8.5 million viewers in the US, not a good number for such a high cost show.  If we assume <bam>yeah I know what happens when you assume<zing> the show has the usual audience lost we are talking 5 million viewers by week six, without increasing its audience no way this show keeps this high of budget.

The pacing of the first episode was poor, could be the lack of a true pilot episode hampered the development team, but it wears out your audience to keep changing pace.

The major problem with Gotham is it suffers from Pre-Sequelitis in every ways shape and form.   As an audience we know what happens to all the characters, its like having been presented with the final chapter or two of a book as a sample on Amazon and than asking us to read the entire book.   Before you say wait its about the journey not the destination, we also know the journey that many of the main characters will be taking along the way.   This means that even though there may be threats against Barbara Keen (James Gordon Fiancée) we know that they will not be followed through on, as she and James get married, have a son (James Jr.) adopt James Niece Babs/Barbara who goes on to become Batgirl, before Barbara Keen-Gordon gets divorced and moves to Chicago.  Talk about dramatic detachment for the audience. 

We know lots of information about the Riddler, Penguin, Falcone, and dozens of other characters things like Selina Kyle (aka Catwoman Catgirl) is potentially the illegitimate child of Carmine Falcone, aka the Roman, I mean the head of Gotham largest crime family, mob-boss.  

Knowing the future also creates another problem for the audience, we know that James Gordon fails to cleanup Gotham City, because without his failure you cannot have the rise of Batman.

In addition its set "too far" in advance of onset of Batman as many potential characters do not arrive on the scene until just before or as Bruce Wayne becomes a vigilante.

Another problem for Gotham is one that the casual viewer may not even pick up on, but a major change in the story line.   Originally the show was supposed to be about James Gordon rise through the ranks of the Gotham City police department as the city falls into corruption and disrepair.   However DC Comics and Fox agreed the show become more of an origin story of everyone.  This would make more sense in Bruce Wayne was a teenager <bam> a la Smallville<pow>.  

Am I the only person who watched the show that thought the skylines of Gotham and Glittery look of the transition scenes looked faked.  I looked it up and yes they are a small scale model fake.   It s also very detaching to have so many, long lasting, versions of the transitions.   Once I started to count there were 10 in the second half show each lasting like five minutes (okay maybe only 5to 10  seconds)  I am guessing we had three to four minutes of these transition scenes total, in a 43 minute show.

One of my pet peeves, the show is set in the late 70's early 80's according to the cars and other items, yet everyone has a "modern cell phone".   I hate to break it to you people but those two things don't go together.  Yeah I will call Dick Tracy, but I mean....

I suspect that we will get all 16 episodes of year one, the show will not get an order for 8-10 additional episodes in year one and will renewed for year two.