TV Review: The Flash

Once Upon a Time, comic book heroes used to be fun. There was such a thing as camp. The absurdity of super-villains being fought by a guy in a cape and colored underwear was treated as the silliness that it, in fact, was.

Then Tim Burton turned Batman into Goth, and Christopher Nolan transformed the story of young Bruce Wayne becoming the Caped Crusader into an opera.  Gotham continues this tradition on Fox, although the show has been pushing the limits of unintentional comedy lately (when a vigilante starts killing people by attaching them to ascending weather balloons, it never occurs to Detective Jim Gordon or his partner that eventually, somewhere, the bodies will return to Earth).

But the newest incarnation of The Flash, on The CW, brings the funny back. It promises to out-camp the 1990 version, thanks to better special effects technology and a somewhat more accomplished cast.

For the uninitiated, The Flash is about a crime scene analyst named Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) who acquires the gift of super speed when he is struck by a lightning bolt caused by a strange experiment at a nuclear laboratory.  Treating a premise like that seriously would work about as well as putting on a Chekov play with chimpanzees.

The cast includes the always reliable Jesse L. Martin as a police detective who learns Barry’s secret (and is the father of the girl Barry has an unrequited crush on).  Martin invests his character with immediate gravitas thanks to his time on the Law and Order TV series. The cast also includes the wonderful Tom Cavanaugh, with his patented quirkiness dialed down from eleven, as the brilliant physicist responsible for the nuclear accident who now wants to help Barry harness his potential.

But unquestionably the most brilliant stroke of casting is John Wesley Shipp as Barry’s father, serving time in prison for the murder of Barry’s mother.  Shipp played Barry Allen/The Flash in the 1990 series, and it is a hoot seeing him now play the parent of the same character. Barry’s mother died under mysterious circumstances, and with his new powers Barry hopes to uncover the truth and free his father.

There are some other bits of business set up in the pilot, such as an unsmiling woman scientist and a happy-go-lucky technician who work with Cavanaugh to monitor Barry’s development, and the fact that Barry’s crush is having a secret affair with her father’s partner.  And Cavanaugh’s character is harboring a Great Secret.

I hope The Flash doesn’t go the way of its parent show, Arrow; that show started off interesting, but then the backstory started to make no sense and I couldn’t distinguish the star of the show (Stephen Amell) from a block of wood.  Gustin imbues Barry Allen with some of Andrew Garfield’s vibe in The Amazing Spiderman, and if he doesn’t take things too seriously this show could be a lot of fun.

Interestingly, the tone of the show meshes somewhat with that of Marvel’s Agents of Shield, which follows it on another network.  Tuesday nights just got a lot more interesting.