SUPERHERO TELEVISION
WHY DC IS BETTER THAN MARVEL ON NETWORK TV
In a few short years, we won’t actually need to append the term “superhero” to any film or television show: it will become ubiquitous enough that we can just safely assume that the characters in this comedy about a group of friends trying to make it in the big city, or this searching drama about a mother’s slow dissolution into dementia, are super-powered — or at least billionaire geniuses who become masked vigilantes at night — and get on with our day.
Soon after, the very concept of a fictional character without superpowers will become completely antithetical to our notions of storytelling, and we’ll start to get weird retconning throughout history: Don Quixote will have the power to transform windmills into dragons with his psyonic blast, Citizen Kane will be re- edited to include a subplot where Captain Rosebud triumphantly settles the Spanish- American War. Two centuries from now, some mad genius will set a long-play VRverse in world where no one actually has any superpowers, and it will be hailed as a bold new frontier for fiction.
Doing their best to rush us into our brave new future, The CW — by way of CTV up here — is adding not just one but an entire team of superheroes to their increasingly stacked roster with Legends of Tomorrow. Spun off from the successful Arrow and Flash franchises, it’s about a group of DC characters you’d have to have a weekly cubby at your local comic- book store to know travelling across time to prevent a madman from taking over the world in 200 years. Sadly, the madman does not yet appear to be a metaphor for superhero culture, but the preview was only two episodes.
Early returns suggest that Legends is proof that more is not always more, but we should take that for what it’s worth. Four years ago few would have predicted that a show about a cut-rate Batman with a quiver instead of a utility belt would go on to not just prop up but effectively dominate a television network. Legends of Tomorrow is the third show in the “Arrowverse,” with more being teased. And if there’s reason to give Legends time to find its wings, it’s because up until now, the CW’s DC-based comic shows have been the best of their kind, at least as far as network series are concerned.
If that sounds a little hedgy, it’s only because it doesn’t strictly feel fair to compare shows with the outside pressures of Arrow and Flash to the more premium setup of Marvel’s Netflix offerings. Network shows have to be engaging across dozens of episodes per season, and aren’t birthed in one finished whole so much as pieced together. Still, if that gives stuff like Daredevil and Jessica Jones a thematic and stylistic cohesion, Ar- row and Flash are often just as good at exploring their heroes’ psyches, albeit with a bit more filler.
It’s that filler, naturally, where Arrow and Flash tend to come alive. They draw not so much on the superhero tradition as the good oldfashioned ensemble television show: their closest spiritual analogue is not so much the soapy dramatics of Smallville as the complexities of ’90s stress- job shows like NYPD Blue or E.R., where groups of talented people face life- altering decisions and then deal with the ripples in their everyday lives. It’s more ripped abs than Sipowicz’s butt, and occasionally Flash runs so fast he actually goes back in time, but those are more issues of scale than content. The focus of these shows is on the effects a decision to help people in the abstract has on people in the specific.
Just how good they are at grounding that in sharp patter and honest moments becomes clearer when you compare them to their network brethren, the Marvel-universe-set Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter, the latter of which returns for its second season on Tuesday. Undoubtedly hamstrung by their intricate but ultimately bit ties to the movie universe — the smallscreen realities of Arrow, Flash and Legends were rather pointedly left out of DC’s movie plans — they have also suffered from not being able to find a purpose beyond brand recognition. Carter flirts occasionally with a sort of postwar feminism, while SHIELD just kind of flounders around on monsters of the week, grasping at some notion of paranoia.
The Flash, in contrast, closed its half- season with its hero’s stepdad meeting the son he never knew he had, and being forced to reconcile what family means. That dovetailed nicely with an Arrow plot about that hero having to give up a connection to a son he didn’t know he had, because of the dangers his life presents. All of this involved a lot of secrecy and deception from friends and family, and connects to glimpses of deeper, darker worlds that both Flash and Arrow are occasionally forced to keep from their team of helpers and lovers. It’s the sort of tricky balancing act that the Agents have barely even attempted, much less pulled off.
All of which to me seems to come back to remembering that you are a TV show about superheroes, and not just superheroes in search of a TV show. Legends may tilt that balance some, but up until now the Arrowverse’s creative team has recognized that the mask doesn’t mean half as much as the man ( or, still only occasionally, woman). Even relatively straightforward television is better at exploring the dynamics of people than almost any other medium — throwing a little super speed into that mix doesn’t change the basic equation.