SUPER SIZED
TV shows based on superheroes still a safe choice for studios,
Marvel’s Inhumans, a superhero series that began airing on ABC in September, seemed to have it all. The story of a royal family of superhumans comes from classic 1960s comics. The cast includes Iwan Rheon, the Welsh actor who played the ultimate bad guy, Ramsay Bolton, on HBO’s Game of Thrones. The show got a promotional boost from a unique partnership with the theatre chain Imax Corp.
The audience didn’t materialize. An average of 1.5 million nightly viewers in the coveted 18-to-49 demographic placed it 87th among broadcast shows. Critics ripped the program for its unimaginative plot and weak characters.
“Perhaps, if nothing else, the disaster that is the pilot of ABC’s Marvel’s Inhumans will dissuade network executives from the out-of-control trend of superhero shows,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette critic Rob Owen wrote in his review. Not so fast. The long-running rivalry between Marvel and DC Comics, which began on comic-store shelves and has been most prominent in movie theatres, has now reached the saturation point on television and streaming services. There are more than two dozen superhero shows on the air or in development. The surge is raising the risk of superhero fatigue.
DC’s experience with Supergirl illustrates the potential limitations of the genre. The show first aired in 2015 on CBS, where it earned 2.4 million average viewers in the key under-50 group. On the CW, where Supergirl flew the following year, those numbers aren’t bad. Warner Bros., which owns the show, saved money by clustering the production-with other programs it shoots in Vancouver, rather than its original location in Los Angeles. Still, this season, the show is down to 1.19 million average viewers.
There have already been three cancellations among TV’s superabundance of costumed heroes: Constantine, a DC show about an exorcist, died after 13 episodes on NBC in 2015; Human Target, a DC show on Fox about a bodyguard who assumes the identities of his clients, was dropped in 2011; and ABC cancelled Agent Carter, a Captain America spinoff from Marvel, after two short seasons. ABC, which also broadcasts the Marvel-based Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., hasn’t said if it will pick Inhumans up for a second season.
Channing Dungey, who heads entertainment programming at ABC, said she is undeterred by the Inhumans experience and will continue to delve into the superhero genre.
“The question really is more: What kind of superhero show?” she said. “What’s the tone and how are we doing it? I would never say we’re through with superheroes.” While Walt Disney Co.-owned Marvel has seen its superhero films outdraw those from Time Warner Inc.’s DC Comics at the box office, the balance of power appears more even on the small screen.
DC’s experience with TV heroes dates back to Adventures of Superman and Batman in the 1950s and 1960s. It kicked off the modern era with Arrow on the CW channel in 2012. That show, about an archer whose quiver is packed with trick projectiles, is now in its sixth season and anchors the “Arrow-verse” of spinoffs on the network, including The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow. Indeed, no channel has staked as much on the genre as the CW, a joint venture between Time Warner and CBS. Its newest production, Black Lightning, premiered last week featuring a Black superhero who shoots electricity. The CW now has six superhero shows in production and devotes two full nights of prime time, Mondays and Tuesdays, to the programs.
Mark Pedowitz, the CW’s president, said superhero shows have brought the network, whose audience was once 70-per-cent skewed toward women, a now equal share of male viewers. The strategy hasn’t insulated it from an industrywide slump in ratings, with 18-to-49-yearold viewership down 7.5 per cent in the current season. CW’s audience is flat with last season when online and recorded viewing is taken into account, Pedowitz said, and the shows’ owners also make money when past seasons are shown by Netflix Inc.
Superhero shows in general attract a young, male audience that’s hard for advertisers to reach outside of sports, according to Chris Geraci, who helped direct some $5 billion (U.S.) in ads for clients of the Omnicom media agency. Because superhero programs are based on established characters and can be cross-promoted with related shows, they are somewhat safer bets than the typical new show.
“You sort of have a built-in audience,” Geraci said.
While superhero shows have struggled on big broadcast networks, they seem to have found a better home on streaming services, where the lan- guage and plot lines can get edgier. In 2013, Marvel announced with great fanfare that it was producing four shows and a miniseries to run on Netflix. It was a strategy modelled after Marvel’s supersuccessful “cinematic universe,” with interlocking plots and sharing of characters. The collaboration produced some of the most critically acclaimed superhero shows in Daredevil and Jessica Jones.
The Marvel-Netflix relationship is in flux now that Disney is looking to produce new content for its own online video service launching in 2019.
“We obviously want the Marvel Television series currently on Netflix to have a long and lauded run,” Dan Buckley, president of Marvel Entertainment, said in an email.
New projects, he added, would seek out “networks and platforms that are the best fit for that content, including the Disney-branded streaming service.” There’s likely to be even more superhero shows ahead. Disney CEO Bob Iger has said that gaining more control over superhero franchises such as the X-Men, Fantastic Four and Deadpool was part of the thinking behind his $52.4 billion acquisition of the entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox.
Still, even such stalwarts as the CW are learning there are limits to what TV superheroes can sustain. There was much less competition six years ago, when Arrow debuted, Pedowitz said, and now he won’t have more than four superhero shows on his air at any one time. But he also doesn’t see an end to the superhero race.
“The audience will tell you when the fatigue has set in,” Pedowitz said. “If you have a quality show or a fun show, the audience will stay with it.”