As part of Matt Reeves’s film The Batman, the new take on the classic 1939 comic book character by the guy who’d helped revamp the Planet of the Apes franchise, Warner Brothers greenlit a series of expansions on the world of the film. Reeves wasn’t just spearheading a new Batman movie, he was beginning a Batman cinematic universe of his own.
It was soon announced that a series about the Gotham City Police Department, headed by Jeffrey Wright’s Jim Gordon, would expand on the world of the movie and tell stories that related to The Batman, but didn’t have to actually feature Batman, as in the Caped Crusader himself. However, almost as soon as the GCPD show was announced, word came down that it was being revamped into an Arkham Asylum series.
The initial sell of a Jim Gordon-centric take on the GCPD already faced a little bit of a uphill battle considering that it was only a few years ago that the last GCPD series, Gotham, also centered around a young Jim Gordon. Furthermore, that series spent time in Arkham Asylum—a lot of time in Arkham Asylum, actually, with entire plotlines centered around the hospital and its bevy of monstrous freaks and rogues.
While that show has fans mixed on its various aspects, it was never the “Gotham Central” adaptation that a show centered on the GCPD lead audiences to expect it to be. That comic series, centered on the day-to-day of policing in a city wherein homicidal clowns and penguin-themed gangsters regularly ran amok, is ripe for exploitation, CSI or Law & Order for those where the crime scene could see victims frozen in place or eaten by giant flytraps.
A new series that specifically focused on Jim and his burgeoning command could have been a breath of fresh air, with a couple of caveats. The first is that the landscape isn’t that far away from Batman-related series in the DC universe (most of them being Batman-without-Batman shows like Batwoman or Teen Titans), the second being that TV doesn’t recycle as fast as movies do these days. While there can be multiple Batmans in the movies at once, rebooting TV takes longer.
Jeffrey Wright is one of the best actors working today, in genre pieces or otherwise, turning in great performances in everything from The Hunger Games movies to Westworld to his villainous turn as Dr. Narcisse in Boardwalk Empire. Furthermore, his run in the last two shows proved he already had a solid working relationship with HBO, the streaming arm of Warner Brothers, so it would be familiar for the veteran performer.
Further, Wright had nothing but praise for this version of Jim Gordon, as well as the rest of the production including its Gotham City. Everything seemed set up for a truly engaged actor to anchor a series based on a movie that had excellent hype leading up to its release before opening to massive fanfare and success. With the sudden change to an Arkham series, however, it negated the need to center Wright as the lead, cut out much of the police force’s interaction with Gotham at large, and re-anchored it at a place that would be centered around Batman’s massive rogues’ gallery.
While this works as a great way to introduce new villains for sequels before the films come out, by setting it in a place that’s going to limit the presence of Gotham’s main forces of law and order to limited roles, it could lead to emptiness. A Jurassic Park series working out the logistics of running a dinosaur-filled park can stand to not have Alan Grant or Ian Malcolm anchoring it, another Batman series without Batman (or even Jim Gordon in a large capacity) can’t.
Start with a great idea, one that gives an audience an immediate expectation—known star, more of the Gotham from the recent movie, a focus on the law side of the new The Batman universe letting the films cover the vigilante angle—all of it’s solid. Pull a switcheroo and turn it into an Arkham Asylum series and suddenly everything’s up for grabs all over again.
On the one hand, it’s a fool’s game to not trust the mind behind the latest reboot of one of the most venerable superheroes of all time, a reboot that launched to raves and was so well received during its making that Warner Brothers was champing at the bit to expand the universe in a lot of directions (with a definite Penguin series featuring Colin Farrel as well). And it’s not like there isn’t source material to work from to tell a story set around the asylum for Gotham’s criminally insane.
That said, the source material is very specifically centered around the Joker playing a cat-and-mouse game with the Bat, something that would require Pattinson to have to agree to wear the Batsuit for months and months on top of however much time went into making The Batman and will go into making its sequel, something that casting an old hand at HBO TV like Wright would’ve done seem foolish if they already had the film’s lead locked down for something regular (instead of a possible cameo).
Beyond that, there’s the fact that if the story isn’t Batman-centric, it’s hard to figure out exactly how it could be interesting in a way that’s unique and not just “Arkham is the New Black” for the The Batman universe. Just look at Suicide Squad after all: It knows that rogues work best when they create havoc outside of prison walls, not within them.
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