Gotham season one: a post mortem

Stories, like lives and meals, are supposed to have beginnings, middles, and ends.  So, what can you do with a television show that is only about beginnings?  The TV series Lost ran into this problem at the start of their third season.  They couldn’t move the narrative ahead because they didn’t know how much time they had until their end date, so they produced some of the worst episodes of the series by simply spinning their wheels.  In a commentary track co-creator Damon Lindelof noted that they kept Kate ad Sawyer in polar bear cages for six episodes, conceding “I think I know why our fans came to hate us so much.”

Gotham has had to navigate the same area, setting up all sorts of origin stories for all of the famous characters we associate with Batman.  The problem is, the end game won’t happen for another fifteen or twenty years; Selina Kyle is a pre-teen girl, not “Catwoman.”  Bruce Wayne is a whiny little kid, not “Batman.”  Whenever they produce any character development, they have to slam on the breaks lest they go too fast.  We can’t have a 14 year old flying around the city fighting crime, can we?

The decision to renew Gotham is based more on sunk costs than quality.  The show looks good, with a lot of money put into creating an urban landscape that is both familiar and other-worldly.  The large cast is generally excellent; Robin Lord Taylor has redefined The Penguin, Ben McKenzie brings an intensity to a young Jim Gordon unimagined in the 1960’s series, Donal Logue provides a needed comic relief from McKenzie’s intensity, and Sean Pertwee has proven to be a stalwart Alfred Pennyworth. 

But the writing, my God, the writing.  The show keeps coming back to the origin stories of all the characters from the Dark Knight canon, but the fact is those characters won’t be who we are familiar with for a decade and a half.  So any progress would either have to be infinitesimal, or would create characters ahead of their time.  When the show doesn’t focus on origin stories, it is mostly dealing with mundane stuff like the mob war between Falcone and Maroni.  Way to take an exotic urban locale and make it like The Sopranos.

The show has had a few (very few) episodes that sort of got a look into how Gotham created the kind of villains that needed to be fought by Batman.  Spirit of the Goat resurrected an old case of Harvey Bullock’s that showed how institutions and the people who run them can’t be trusted.  Red Hood dealt with a gang of bank robbers whose leader was whoever happened to put on a red mask that seemed to take over their minds.  These were shows that were interested in telling a story from begging to the middle to the end, not with providing another clue that Oswald Cobblepot is a tiny bit unhinged.

But mostly the show was about arcs, long drawn out arcs that became like those guys who used to appear in the Ed Sullivan show spinning plates (am I dating myself?).  They ran out of stuff for Fish Mooney (Jada Pinkett Smith) to do in Gotham so they shipped her off to a mysterious island to meet The Dollmaker for several episodes for no apparent reason.  Cobblepot played Falcone off Maroni endlessly, until both of them looked like idiots for trusting him.  Jim Gordon vowed to fight corruption, as if his snarl was enough to convince bad cops to walk the straight and narrow.

Despite the good things about the cast, there were definite dead zones.  Cory Michael Smith was never given anything to work with in creating The Riddler, all he could deliver was a wide grin and some tics.  Jada Pinkett Smith chewed the scenery in an entertaining fashion for a while as Fish Mooney, but we always had to take her criminal genius on faith because she rarely displayed any business smarts.  Thank heavens dead weight Erin Richards, as Gordon boring girlfriend Barbara, was replaced by the far more interesting Morena Baccarin as his love interest; a couple of times Baccarin actually got Gordon to smile.

The producers of Gotham seem more intent on fan service than creating an atmospheric TV show about a corrupt city and its need for a White Knight.  It is easier to throw knowing winks at the audience than develop a coherent narrative with a beginning, middle and end.  But they will have a second season to try and get it right.  Given that the second season is a reward for screwing up the first season, I am not optimistic.  I swear, if they break out the Bat-signal, I’m done.