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) fifth season. When the show started I had an idea of how it could best end and that’s pretty much what happened.

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 knocked me off the show and I watched every week. I love this universe and I’m happy with the end product. The final season was really tight too, so that helped. The writers knew how much time they had left when starting this final season and that enabled them to write a series finale that stuck the landing.

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.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a kid in a red suit granted super powers by an ancient wizard! It’s Shazam!

This DC character dates all the way back to 1939 and while he’s had his own TV show and cartoons over the years, he’s been more or less a background character in the DC line-up. He’s even a Justice League member but the likes of Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern and Superman always take up more attention. It’s with this movie that he gets put front and center.

Billy Batson is a 14 year old foster kid who’s been bouncing around the system since his single mother disappeared when he was around 6 years old. Billy understandably has a hole in his heart from this traumatic event and when we meet him, he’s run from a foster home in search for his mother. He gets caught and is once again sent to another foster home, this one with a young couple and 5 other foster kids aged 7-17. Billy is pretty stand-offish in this environment and one of the kids, Freddy, does his best to bring Billy into the family fold.

At the same time, the Wizard is looking for his Chosen One, a person pure of heart to absorb his amazing powers and defend Earth from the Seven Deadly Sins. He discovers Billy and it changes his life (understatement of the year).

A combination of Superman and the classic Tom Hank’s movie, Big, Shazam! is a ton of fun. It’s a good mixture of humor, action, and drama that uses the superhero mythos to wrap the story in adventure and character development. Along with Superman, there’s a side dose of Spider-man. An average person becomes extraordinary after one chance event. For every problem he has, he can practically punch his way through it now. And for someone dealing with anger and abandonment, that’s an even greater challenge to manage. These powers, as Billy quickly finds out, are dangerous. When he says “Shazam!” and transforms from kid to super being, it’s a lot of responsibility.

There’s a lot of kid fantasy going on this movie. If you could fly, had incredible strength, and could fire lightning out of your hands, what would you do? Freddy is next to Billy through all of this and together they figure out what Billy can do. Freddy has to watch on the sidelines though, watching his new friend flounder and struggle with these abilities he would love to have. They argue too after Billy inadvertently causes more harm than good and gets the attention of a supervillain, Dr. Sivana, who has become obsessed to claim the powers of Shazam after the wizard denied him the chance decades years ago.

There’s a lot to like in Shazam. It looks fantastic, the special effects are all around very good. There are some killer hero shots spread around (my favorite being when Billy jumps off an apartment roof and transforming just as he starts to fall and flies off like a boss to save the world) and the action scenes, while rather infrequent, offer something different each time. I really like Dr. Sivana, his set up is pretty dark and motivation works well to me. I was really suprised at how intense the movie got, there’s some scary imagery for the younger set to witness here. The movie walks a line of showing that there are big stakes at play, but it never gets gruesome. The humor balances things out as well too, the entire cast (especially Zachary Levi as Shazam) looks like they had a lot of fun making this.

My only complaint is that the beginning drags a bit. It’s an origin story so there’s a lot of set up and if you’ve seen the trailer you basically know every beat. But once it really gets going, the last half really flexes and the movie never looks back. I think all the build up has a great payoff at the end as the finale surprised me in it’s direction and was a lot of fun to watch.

Finally, kudos to the writer for taking an interesting and rather daring take on family. Billy’s history is an example that very few get born into what I will–for the sake of convenience–call a normal family. Some never know their mother, their father, or both. They may be raised by grand parents or people they have no blood relation to. And then there is life itself which throws more at you than you can ever imagine along the way. It’s Billy’s quest to find his family that sticks with you most. Your family doesn’t begin and end with the one you are born into, it expands into the one you make when you open up your heart to others.