I am a big Superhero fan, well not really. I am was not into e comics. I was not into the backstories. And I am really only concerned about Superman. It was the first movie that I had ever seen. I think I only s that because my parents felt guilty for not taking me to see Star Wars the year previous. That does not matter, because as first movies go, Superman is one of the best. Superman is more worth as a role model than any of the Star Wars characters.
So when there was a Superman reboot years ago, I was all over it. The Smallville that I claim to be from is way smaller than the town in the television show Smallville. The people in it are smaller too, they have smaller minds and shorter views. Well truthfully, most people in the world have smaller minds and shorter views. But the reboot of Superman, Smallville, could not be that way.
And it wasn't. The plot lines were stretched a bit the believability was extended, the lead actors too pretty and too many little perfections. But there was a good plot device the meteors. The kryptonite that was making people Super, well making teenagers Super and teenagers at the same time. Great says every parent ever. The plots were mostly about mutants and teenage issues. The writing took care of itself, because it was not real world issues. It was pure fantasy and pure fun, because everyone knew how the story ends. There was the introduction of all the super villains and the audience knew that they were villains, but did they have to be bad? Did the good guys have to be good? Was this Super 90201? And now it was not. The show knew what it was and what it wasn't. It was the story of Superman and it was not a crime series. It did not lie to itself.
There were year between the end of Smallville and the start of the next Superhero television show. Hollywood writers are bad, there is no other way to put it. They are not used to writing stories anymore. The decade and more of Reality TV has dulled their dying trade. No one is not saying that reality TV is not scripted, but the writing is basic and about creating human conflict. The only writing is done on the various CSI shows, which I don't watch, ever. And it shows. If you are going to write story lines that use the real world as a backdrop, it would be better that the writing be a step above minimum. It would be good if they have a little scientific accuracy. That they don't have scientific accuracy shows that they are sloppy and not interested in believability.
Last week I started watching television again. I had been watching Doctor Who, but I have been increasingly been disgusted in the scientific inaccuracies in it. Sure, Doctor Who has a perfect excuse of having a sufficiently advanced technology that would appear to be magic, but lately things have been being written that defies the logic of the overall story lines. Bad Doctor. So I started branching out.
I started watching the latest iteration of The Flash. It is fun. It is like Smallville, a Super hero with Super villains and no attempt to explain it because it IS magic and magic does not exist. And like the original Flash story, it is fun and uplifting. No problems yet, I will continue to watch. Whoa, what is this, he is talking to another Marvel comic hero, the Green Arrow, is there another show?
So I sought it out, it took half a minute to do the google search, green arrow tv, done = Arrow. And then I binged on the first season. Apparently the Queens live in Lex Luther's house. I am fine with that, kudos Vancouver netting another super hero series. Lots of great settings to film in that fine city and a huge rainforest to work with. But the writing, it sucks. The casting sucks too. Smallville standard here. The teenagers looked like teenagers. Quick check here, thank you Google and IMDB, three of the four friends who were supposed to be teenagers, were in fact teenagers and they looked like teenagers too. None of the cast of arrow was. Thea Queen was supposed to be a teenager, but she did not look the part. Fine that is minor, I can live with it.
Then the writers started going all CSI and throwing jargon into the stories, jargon that means something, but the writers just through it in because they had a thesaurus and it sounded scientific. How long does it take to do a Google search? Less time than it takes to open a thesaurus and look up a synonym for Longshoreman. Perhaps, they did use the Internet thesaurus, but they did not look further than stevedore. If they had they would know that it is a word that not used in North America. Settings people, why complicate plots by confusing your audience.
Science. There was a fire and someone was murdering firefighters by spraying accelerants on them and burning them to death, cool story idea, but then the writers wrote that the fire was burning at 200° and the fire fighters burned at 700°. Am I pedantic, probably, but would not a quick google search have been in order to find out how hot fires get? A small merry crackling fire in your fireplace, or in your campfire reaches temperatures in excess of 800°F. This is an American show so I assume that the quoted temperatures were in Fahrenheit, so most watchers would understand it. I learned that little factoid in grade nine science, the minimum level of science you need in Ontario.
So I am saying that the writers like using scientific words to make things appear realistic, but can't do the minimum research to make their plots accurate. Poor casting, poor acting, lousy scripts; I watched the season because I am OCD. Acting, I did not mention that. The lead, Oliver Queen was cast because he looks good without his shirt on, we know this because he does not wear his shirt a lot every episode. The feats of strength that were shown were just that, feats. I am not jealous, the thing he did with the chain looped over a pulley attached to four cinder blocks that he used as a weight to lift - I could do that. A pulley doubles the amount of weight you can lift, the chain which was heavier than the blocks was not being lifted per se, it was counter balanced by the chain on the other side of the pulley. And since there was more chain on his side, it may have been countering some of the weight of the blocks. So lifting four blocks on a pulley is like lifting two with your bare hands, and that is not a real feat of strength. It is just theatrics. Hey it is good theatrics, but it is the type of theatrics he needs to do to avoid acting, which he can't do. He is not believable.
John Barrowman, now how can you forget him. He dose not make a good villain because, well he does bad well. It is the writing. It says that he is still in the series, so I have to watch more to see how he comes back. Captain Jack.
Gotham, is a crime story. It is about the players before they become who they were in all the movies centered around Jim Gordon, rookie detective and War Hero. The corruption in Gotham is rife and the criminals are, the good guys are… well there it is complicated. Gotham is Metropolis's darker brother, and the childhood of the Dark Knight is a counter to Clark Kent's sunny childhood. Much like Smallville the children in it are in fact children. Bruce Wayne is played by a 13 year old, not an 11 year old, but who can tell. Selina Kyle is played by a 15 year old. My point is, these characters are children. They do the job well. And the story, centering around the cop who plays second fiddle in all the stories to Batman and the numerous murderous villains is fresh.
Four Hero stories to follow for my Superman OCD. Though I don't recommend Arrow, I will continue to watch.
Did I forget Agents of Shield? Yes I did. This is a really cool novel approach to TV. It is just a skin to a larger story. There are the Avenger Movies and the movies that contain Avengers, like Thor, Ironman, the Hulk, and many more. Agents of Shield is the background and the tie in. There are characters that bridge the gap and there are back stories in the television experience that are missing from the movies. There are cross genera complications. And this makes this show better than any other super hero show out there, because you are going to get more out of it than the others shows. If you watch the big screen you will get the story, if you watch the small screen you will get the story. If you watch both you will see the whole story. When the Thor movie came out, Shield was unprepared, because they WERE unprepared and the TV show was playing clean up. When Captain America movie came out, the lead up to the betrayal was the theme of the shows and when Fury went missing it had to pick up the pieces. The plots are connected, and there will be more story bridges.
Five Super Hero shows.
We need Wonder Woman next . . .. Wait is there a young X-Men out there?
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