Television is the perfect medium to put a fresh spin on a familiar superhero property. Smallville turned Clark Kent’s rural childhood into a coming-of-age origin story. Watchmen gave Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel a satisfying sequel. WandaVision put the Scarlet Witch in a sitcom-inspired fantasyland. Loki put the God of Mischief in an interdimensional case-of-the-week procedural. The Penguin adapted Gotham’s monocled crime lord into a Sopranos-style gangster drama. Batman Beyond jumped forward to a cyberpunk Gotham of the future, where an old, retired Bruce Wayne is training his own replacement in the neon-drenched dystopian metropolis.
Bruno Heller, the creator of Rome and The Mentalist, came up with an ingenious conceit for a Batman show. Gotham retells the Dark Knight’s story from Jim Gordon’s perspective. It starts off with Gordon as an up-and-coming detective, long before he would become the city’s police commissioner, trying to solve the murders of Thomas and Martha Wayne.
In its first season, Gotham was a relatively realistic police procedural set on the streets of Gotham City. We followed Gordon about his detective work as he uncovered a burgeoning gang war between the Gotham crime families run by Carmine Falcone, Sal Maroni, and Fish Mooney. But the series soon embraced the wackier elements of the Batman mythos, and the more sci-fi-infused Batman villains, and eventually became even more bonkers than its superpowered counterpart, Smallville.
Over the course of 100 episodes across five seasons, Gotham used Gordon’s early police career to chart the origin stories of various villains from the Bat’s rogues’ gallery: Edward Nygma frames Gordon for murder; Hugo Strange conducts sinister experiments at Arkham; the Mad Hatter threatens the city with a deadly virus. Eventually, after a time jump aged Bruce Wayne into adulthood, the series covered Batman’s own origin story. Gotham is a much wilder ride than you’d think.
Gotham Just Got Better & Better Across 5 Seasons
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When Gotham premiered its first season, it got off to a promising start, but it wasn’t a masterpiece right away. It felt a little tonally uneven, as the writers cherry-picked wildly different elements from Batman lore and struggled to find the right balance between them, and it did little more than bring a case-of-the-week procedural format to the world of Batman. In season 2, that tonal inconsistency continued, but the show found its feet. It settled into a compelling overarching storyline to string the case-of-the-week episodes together with a serialized narrative arc, and it got a lot darker and a lot more focused.
In its third season, Gotham started getting much weirder and wilder. It let its freak flag fly as it started embracing the creepier, scarier, more bizarre baddies from Batman’s stable of enemies. The writers realized the supervillains were stealing the show — especially since Bruce is the one who’s destined to become Gotham’s savior, not Jim, so Jim’s story was basically just waiting for a job promotion — so they started giving the villains a lot more airtime. Gordon became a bounty hunter, tracking down the Indian Hill monsters, while Ra’s al Ghul plotted to leave the city in ruin and the Court of Owls guided Bruce through his Bat-training.
In the fourth and fifth seasons, Gotham went all-in on Batman himself, as it completed Bruce’s journey from grief-stricken orphan to masked superhero. Sofia Falcone challenges the Penguin’s throne, Nyssa al Ghul seeks revenge for her father’s death, and Bruce finally fulfills his destiny of becoming Gotham’s Caped Crusader. Gotham isn’t necessarily just for Batman fans, or even just for comic book fans; it’s a cop show like any other, but the crooks happen to have fancy monikers (and some of them have superpowers), so it’s a lot more exciting than the average cop show.
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