The sale of Fox to Disney has changed the media landscape. Among those changes is a DC property not existing on a now Disney owned channel. So Gotham was brought to a close in a shorter (12 episodes)
Gotham wasn’t about Batman which is what many people wanted from the start. It put that first tent pole into the ground right from the start, that they’d show how Bruce and Gotham came to need Batman.
Over the years I’ve enjoyed Gotham a lot. I liked seeing the new angles of established characters and lore along with new characters. The big highlight was always the casting, which was near perfect. The standouts for me are Sean Pertwee as Alfred, Robin Lord Taylor as Oswald Cobblepot, Cory Michael Smith as Edward Nygma, Drew Powell as Butch Gilzean, Erin Richards as Barbara Kean, Benedict Samuel as Jervis Tetch, Anthony Carrigan as Victor Zsasz, Donal Logue as Harvey Bullock, BD Wong as Dr. Hugo Strange and Cameron Monaghan crushed it as 3 eras of Joker. The Batman universe has many colorful characters so quality character actors were needed. I also appreciated the effort into making Gotham look like its own city (looking at you with the side eye Christopher Nolan). The production value on this show was always tops.
The series started rough. The tone of the show swung wildly from scene to scene. The first major trouble maker was a guy who tied giant helium balloons to people’s legs and they’d float away. It’s pretty absurd and goofy looking. In the next scene, you’d see Penguin in a blackout rage shank a guy in the neck with a broken beer bottle. From there the show found its groove, leaning onto the darker side of things. I guess being consistent helps keep you on a path, the show was never afraid of offing someone on camera and they stuck with that. The villains on this show were committed to being awful people in their own ways.
The other problem was that the writers tried to do too much. Batman has a huge rogues gallery that is stuffed with characters that fans love. It seemed like they wanted to get every one of them on screen come hell or high water. Being a prequel, some characters wouldn’t fit in the timeline so they’d age the character down. Every season there was a major villain introduced and things got crowded real fast. From the start they stuck with Riddler and Penguin and that worked the best. The two main mob boss families had great roles too.
There must have been a mandatory minimum of 6 active villains at once because if one went away they’d be immediately replaced. I mean, they managed to get Solomon Grundy on here. They did some great starting stuff with Scarecrow, but that fizzled out and disappeared. The worst was Ivy. The case of de-aging the character might have seemed like a good idea at first, making her a friend to a young Celina Kyle, but the writers had no idea what to do with her. She was never more than a cameo and they changed actresses I think twice, making her look older, to try and use her but that didn’t work well either. She might look older but that’s still supposed to be a teenager. While she ended up having an impact on the show in a late Celina plot, she was never truly Poison Ivy. The approach from the start didn’t work and that cut off any avenues of growth. Ivy becomes Poison as an adult, that’s something that couldn’t be shoehorned into. She had specific life experiences that got her there.
In the end, I had a lot of fun with this show. I think it gave a lot of people a kick to their careers because there’s some fantastic acting work here. While there are bumps for sure, nothing
A brief pause for the Batman universe as Epix has a Pennyworth show airing soon, Joker starring Joaquin Phoenix comes out this October, and the next solo Batman movie helmed by Matt Reeves for a summer 2021 release is starting to take shape.