A long, long while ago, I offered up a defense of Justice League. Others have gone to great lengths to rip it to shreds in every other respect, and no doubt it earned some of that shade, but I took the liberty to praise Warner Bros for their courage and commitment.
Justice League’s criticism, and that of the DCU at the movies, might be overblown but the takeaway is this: DC is hit and miss at the box office and still a long way off if they want to get their extended universe to work. That being in the cinema, mind you. Elsewhere, the small screen is a different story.
The CW is home to a glut of DC-based programming that all ties together. This is thanks to the multiverse of superheroes, which has led to many eventful crossovers. But DC’s reach on broadcast TV doesn’t restrict itself to the CW. One outlier exists in a continuity all its own, outside the movies and CW.
Gotham has run on FOX for four seasons and is a unique dip into the Batman mythos. Bruce’s origins as Batman are secondary to the underbelly of Gotham City itself. The series unfolds from the perspective of the villains and the city’s police force. Paramount to both are The Penguin and (eventual) Commissioner Gordon.
Gordon was meant to be the main character and Ben McKenzie has an earnest, commanding presence in the part. Notwithstanding, if Gotham has a central character amongst its network-narrative gaggle of Batman Rogues and corrupt cops, Penguin is that guy.
From the start, deliberately or not, Gotham has been the origin of Oswald Cobblepot, played lambently manic by Robin Lord Taylor. This is something that ought to meet with more appreciation than it does. Batman Returns (1992) was the last time — over 20 years ago — Penguin’s backstory was explored to great psychological depth. A revisiting of the character was long overdue.
While he has always played a prominent role in comics and cartoons, as far as live action went, attention was constantly paid to The Joker, Two-Face, and (more and more) Bane and Ra’s al-Ghul. As legendary and historic as The Penguin is, he’s had few chances to really shine and be fleshed out.
The same is true for other featured antagonists. Season 3 became the playground of Dr. Hugo Strange, the least likely of any to make an appearance, but there he was. And they didn’t half-ass casting him: they reached out to a name with chops, BD Wong.
Simultaneously, Wong returned to a role that made him famous, Dr. Wu, in Jurassic World. Here we have, on a smaller scale, a continuation of casting talented well-known actors as characters plucked from obscurity. Some manage to become household names: Ras (Liam Neeson), Bane (Tom Hardy), Rocket & Groot (Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel), Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), Thanos (Josh Brolin).
Once the character gets a Hallmark ornament, they’ve made it.
The same can be said for Mr. Freeze (including the ornament). Although Victor did get second billing to Strange — he’d fallen out of favor due to the debacle that was Batman & Robin (Shumacher, 1997) — Fries showed up for two particularly memorable and riveting episodes in which a version of his original origin was used. To a large degree, he got his legacy back and viewers were all reminded of what made him so interesting and (yeah) cool in the first place.
Freeze might not be as marketable or popular as he once was, but he was played by an action star and a famous director (Otto Preminger) in the ’60s, his first appearance won an Emmy for the cartoon, and — little-known fact — the guy who voiced him, Michael Ansara, has a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.
The creators behind Gotham surely know that fact and appreciate it as they do all the aspects of the Bat-verse they present to us. You may ask yourself, “But where’s Batman?” Or, “Wasn’t this supposed to be about Jim Gordon and the Gotham PD?” But you’d be missing the point of the show.
Whether the perspective is the villains’, the cops’, or young Bruce’s doesn’t matter. What sets Gotham apart from Batfleck is the pastiche that draws on the property’s history, sometimes as deep as an archaeologist. They find inventive ways of working in The Red Hood (who was a deep cut from the past before Alan Moore), Firefly (whose heyday was undoubtedly in the 90s), The Court of Owls (a new development that won over readers extremely well), and Leslie Tompkins.
Granted, Tompkins isn’t an old lady this time who knows Batman’s secret identity, but she doesn’t have to be and nor should she with her place in the show’s timeline. What Morena Baccarin brings to the role is what Leslie requires to grow so we understand how she became — potentially — that trusted confidant.
Showrunners at Fox have a better idea of how to utilize their characters they draw from their massive pool and get the most out of them. With Joker, that may not be the case, but the Clown Prince of Crime has had his time in the sun for decades. Frankly, we can live with a little less Joker for a spell.
And if he does end up dominating the figurative gravitational zone of Gotham, like most things Bat-centric, the good news is he won’t wind up a CIA agent shot dead in the desert like Jimmy Olson. Everybody, including Zack Snyder, has probably learned from that error.
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