Months ago it was announced that DC and Warner Brothers, fresh off the success of Arrow on The CW, was going to be developing more live action TV shows around DC’s major heroes. They announced plans for a Constantine show, an iZombie show and most prominently, “Gotham.” Which was described as being a crime procedural following the young career of Gotham Police Commissioner Jim Gordon, in his days as a detective, complete with the unique cast of supporting characters that make up Gotham city, but decidedly no appearance of The Batman. It was to be an all Jim Gordon, all the time, cop show.
However, that seems to have changed recently as Fox Chairman Kevin Reilly said at a TCA Media Event,”The show will track Bruce from a child (around 12 years old) until he puts on a cape (in the finale).” He’s also called the show something of an “operatic soap,” similar to Smallville. He also had mention of Catwoman, The Riddler and The Penguin. All this comes only weeks after an episode of noted writer/director Kevin Smith’s podcast “Fatman on Batman” where the author of Widening Gyre, and Cacophony (as well as the upcoming Batman: Bellicosity) talked at length with Batman: TAS‘s Paul Dini about a version of the Gotham TV show that centred around Bruce Wayne’s childhood instead of Commissioner Gordon’s early career. They described something strikingly similar to what Reilly has described as the new direction for the show, including character arcs, possible plot lines and even writers. The pair concluded their long, energetic (and frankly very entertaining) conversation by mentioning the likely possibility of pitching their version of the show to DC creative head Geoff Johns, someone both men have worked with in the past, with great working relationships. Johns is DC’c creative head and is very involved in not only the upcoming Gotham but also Arrow (as well as finding time to write books like Justice League and Forever Evil) and would be someone with an incredible amount of pull over the infant Gotham series.
Is the new, confirmed, direction for this Gotham series related to Kevin Smith and Paul Dini’s hot boxed epiphanies? Well, we may never know, but it very well could be. Never the less we do know that the show will be focusing no on young Bruce Wayne, not James Gordon.
Either way, take a listen to Fatman on Batman 51: Shadow Of The Bat, just in case.
http://smodcast.com/episodes/paul-dini-shadow-of-the-bat/
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