by Brendan Foley
The rivalry between DC and Marvel goes back decades, a comic book Cold War that has been running since before their current target audience’s parents were born. While we can debate forever which company is currently putting out the best comics, there can be little doubt that when it comes to live action interpretations of their characters, Marvel is stomping on the competition like Galactus stomping on… non-Galactuses… non-Galactii… on small people, OK?
Even if you are one of those that don’t enjoy the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there’s no arguing that in terms of financial and pop culture impact, Marvel has bested everything DC has been able to come up with, with the exception of the Christopher Nolan Batman films. And now, as Warner Bros. builds up to Batman V Superman (ugh, that title) and the roll out of characters and potential series’ to come after, it is hard to believe how little enthusiasm any of their projects has engendered from fandom. Every release of new images and trailers is greeted with apathy, bafflement, if not outright disdain. While there is still all the potential in the world for these films to be great and hit big, the WB/DC films continue to feel like also-rans in the modern age of comic book cinema.
But there’s one area in which DC has a leg up on Marvel. While Marvel has struggled to translate their success to television (so far they’ve come up with the very blah Agents of SHIELD and the much better but somewhat blah-adjacent Agent Carter and Daredevil) The CW has managed to craft a thriving superhero universe, buoyed by strong core casting and a willingness to embrace the ridiculous and pulpy nature of their stories and characters.
It all started out with Arrow, a show that looked not unlike a Funny Or Die sketch when it first showed up. After all, it was The CW doing a ‘gritty’ version of Green Arrow, a character so lame and contrived he makes Hawkeye look actually fucking relevant. Things were not helped when every promotional image featured little more than blandly handsome leading man Stephen Amell staring vacantly into the middle distance with no shirt on.
But then the show got going and, over the course of its first season, it ironed out many of the kinks and ditched the faux-Nolan histrionics to focus on being a rip-roaring, fast-paced action soap opera, with some of the best fights and stunt work you are likely to see on the small screen (not to mention better than much of the shakey-cam fu you get in an infuriating number of theatrical action films). Amell turned out to be a genuinely strong leading man as billionaire playboy Oliver Queen, rescued after spending five years on a desert island (well, mostly he was on an island. Shit gets complicated). Oliver returns home with a mission to save his city from corruption, a mission that is soon joined by ex-soldier John Diggle (David Ramsey) and tech expert Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards). The group battles ninja cults, doomsday plots, super soldiers, and all manner of colorful assassins and crime lords.
Arrow probably could have continued on its own pace, cherry-picking underused aspects of the DC universe to build out its own little world, and it could have thrived for many years, unremarked upon.
Enter The Flash.
Grant Gustin popped up in a couple Arrow episodes as Barry Allen, a young forensic scientist whose life was forever changed when, as a young boy, he saw his mother killer by what looked like a man running within lightning. Barry’s dad went to jail for the murder, and Barry has spent his life tracking stories of strange phenomena in the hopes of finding proof of what he saw. When local super-science facility STAR Labs has an explosion in their particle accelerator, a shockwave rolls across the city and Barry is struck by lightning. When he emerges from a coma, Barry has the power of super-speed and he dedicates himself to fighting people who were similarly gifted with special powers by the explosion and lack his humanistic streak.
When I last wrote about The Flash back in December, I was positive about the overall show while finding there to be several frustrating factors with how the narrative was being arced out over a 22 episode season. It felt like the show was operating with training wheels on. When the show came back from its midseason break, the training wheels were nowhere in sight. Instead, The Flash went all-in on its craziest concepts, embracing notions ranging from time travel to parallel dimensions to giant psychic gorillas. Added to that, the show continued to bring in a wide range of actors indulging in Adam-West-Batman level camp, including Mark Hammill as The Trickster and Wentworth Miller and Dominic Purcell as Captain Cold and Firestorm. While this group hammed it up in the margins, the show always maintained grounded emotional stakes for Gustin’s Allen, and for all the supporting characters. Gustin turned out to a tremendous find, an incredibly likable presence with killer comic timing and sweet disposition, and able to mine truly affecting emotional reserves to deliver some devastating material.
Neither show is perfect. Both Arrow and Flash can suffer from dodgy plotting and pacing (Arrow is coming off a season that was particularly spotty in this regard. Too much lying and manipulation, too many obfuscated motivations) and both shows have limited budgets that can put a cap on how much payoff they can deliver.
But neither show has allowed these impediments to stop them from delivering the goods. While Arrow’s digital effects are often spotty, the action choreography is as top notch as ever, and the closing episodes of season three managed to write off several of the more problematic characters and maneuver others to much more interesting places for next year. Flash meanwhile saves the bulk of its budget for truly sublime money shots, moments which perfectly capture the sort of splash-page imagery that has had comic fans cheering for decades. The finale featured a sequence in which The Flash burst out of a wormhole to smash a villain’s time machine. It was a glorious moment of both superhero spectacle and emotional payoff to Barry’s ongoing battle with this particular character, totally making it worth the multiple times throughout the season when they kept reusing the same shots of Barry running really fast.
So the shows can do action well, they can do wacky plotting well, they can name drop characters and plotlines and keep the fanboys teased. But what is it about the CW shows that has propelled them so high in the public’s estimation?
Humanity.
Whereas so many spectacle-oriented films have surrendered humanity in favor of endless series of digital blips crashing into each other, Arrow and Flash keep the focus exclusively on the people who are actually living through these crazy events, tracking the way individuals rise, falter and sometimes fall as the world goes mad around them. No matter how convoluted and involved the shows’ plots become, the stories are always grounded in the emotional narrative that our heroes (and often our villains) are undergoing.
Take the The Flash finale. Barry doesn’t don his costume until the third act, and even then the closest thing the show has to a final fight lasts only a couple seconds. Instead, the vast, vast majority of the running time is given over to watching Barry and his loved ones puzzle their way through a choice that could redefine their entire lives, and grappling with the fallout of that choice. Granted, this being a superhero show that choice involves people running at supersonic speeds and traveling through time, but that only allows the writers and actors on the show a larger canvas on which to draw the emotional struggles of their character.
The same is true of Arrow. Arrow has gradually evolved to a place where the sanctity of life takes on greater importance than how much cannon fodder can be produced during a battle. When a character dies on Arrow, it results in seismic changes to the characters’ lives, completely rewriting the reality of the show. Both season two and season three are arced entirely around reactions to a beloved character being killed, with a single life forever altering the dynamics of the world.
It’s this focus on humanity that has allowed these shows to thrive. Instead of their budgets being a handicap, both shows have embraced that intimacy and focused on making sure that every battle and every hurdle the characters undergo has genuine importance.
As digital technology continues to improve, filmmakers seem hellbent on hurling more and more soulless destruction at us. But no matter how lovingly rendered the clouds of debris and death might be, we can’t connect to it on a human level. The great filmmakers and great storytellers know that the fantastic needs a connection to the human in order to work and while Arrow and Flash may not always hit that mark (although I will happily make the case that Flash has had the best first season for a show I have seen since Terriers, and if we are limiting it to sci-fi shows, Battlestar Galactica) the emphasis on the human scale reaction to comic book insanity continues to buoy them past any obstacles.
So as the WB scrambles to try and find an enticing angle for their latest round of rain-soaked destruction porn (at least, that’s the image the trailers are putting out there) I’m sure they will be baffled why they can’t crack these characters for the general audience. They fail because they continue to put spectacle over people, because they are pummeling the audience with awe until it is utterly meaningless. You start to wish that someone, anyone, could sit these execs down and show them these low budget little shows airing on a fifth-rate network. Maybe then they would see that heart and humanity will overpower any other considerations. Always.