A few months ago, we talked about how DC should build a TV universe. Apparently, Time Warner executives are reading, because all of a sudden, there are a lot of TV shows based on DC Comics coming to the small screen.
Believe it or not, there are, as of now, no fewer than five TV shows either already on the air or being developed around different DC characters. Here they are, and what we know about them.
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Jim Gordon fights early versions of Batman villains, before Bats shows up. This is being written by the same guy who created The Mentalist, Bruno Heller, and Fox is pretty high on it: They didn’t even order a pilot, but asked that it go straight to series. Whether that’s because Fox wants to work with Heller or wants some Bat action is an open question, but skipping over the pilot means it must at least have one good script.
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The Scarlet Speedster is getting a second shot at television, courtesy of a backdoor pilot on Arrow with a few episodes written by Geoff Johns. It’ll start Grant Gustin as Barry Allen, who will be appearing just as Central City’s finest for a few episodes, before the Flash-centric episode appears sometime next year.
Whether it goes to series is still a bit up in the air, but this is the CW; they put shows like The Tomorrow People on the air. The real question is how long Johns will stick with it; if he’s helping with the scripts, and helps launch the series, that could be a deciding factor.
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NBC apparently wants to be in the jerkass mystic business; they’re working with David Goyer to turn Constantine into a TV hero. This is actually a pretty good fit; the Hellblazer comics are a bit more restrained than most, and NBC actually has some surprisingly effective horror in the form of Hannibal. That said, it’s just a pilot script, for now, so we’ll see if they actually go through with it.
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Another CW series, this one seems to be throwing Miraclo and the attendant discussions about addiction out the window and just focusing on Hourman’s “time vision”; namely, he can see precisely one hour into the future. Rex will apparently be using this to try and stop tragic events before they happen. So it’s basically that Nic Cage movie with the plane crash, only as a series. We have hope, though, as Rex is a “pharmaceutical analyst”, so we might see some superdrugs at some point.
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Finally, there’s this concept, which is seemingly cursed. We’ve noted Hollywood’s difficulty with Wonder Woman before, but the CW seems to really want to make this work. Fingers crossed.
Oh, and, of course, there’s Arrow. Not all of these will make it to the screen… but it’s pretty clear that one way or the other, we’re going to be seeing a lot more DC TV shows.