I still hold out hopes that someone will get a superhero television show right—superhero stories are, after all, procedurals with weirder criminals and more vigorous apprehensions, so it shouldn’t be that hard. But as NBC’s The Cape stuck too close to the tone of actual comics without adding enough humor to avoid utter woodenness, it looks like with Arrow, the CW is hewing to its airbrushed hunks formula, and I’m not sure the hunk can act:
It’s also amazing how much the trailer screams “let’s redeem this guy’s privilege by giving him superpowers!” That’s a long-standing superhero tradition, of course. But it plays as kind of a dodge here. The way to make up for having sex with your girlfriend’s sister on a cruise and getting her killed, or tooling around like a rich playboy jerk is not actually to kill all the corrupt people in your city: it’s to not be the kind of person who cheats on your girlfriend because you’re entitled to do so. It’ll actually be interesting to see if The Dark Knight gets into this at all, and explores the extent to which being Batman gives Bruce Wayne an excuse to continue enjoying the fundamental inequalities he benefits from.
Previous in TP Alyssa
By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.