Trailer for Gotham Knights almost plays like a parody of CW superhero shows

Also, who the hell is Turner Hayes and where are Dick Grayson and Tim Drake?

By Sam Barsanti  |  May 31, 2022 | 10:43pm
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Trailer for Gotham Knights almost plays like a parody of CW superhero shows
Gotham Knights Screenshot: YouTube

Two of the early casualties in The CW’s attempt to get extremely lean and extremely cheap ahead of a potential sale were fan-favorite DC superhero shows Batwoman and DC’s Legends Of Tomorrow. The good news, though, was that the network insisted that it was not totally abandoning the superhero genre, picking up a series called Gotham Knights about Bruce Wayne’s “rebellious adopted son” teaming up with “the children of Batman’s enemies” to solve Batman’s murder. Not bad! We’ve heard worse hooks for superhero stories!

But everything since then has been so baffling and so increasingly baffling, that we’re not sure how many more baffles we can handle. The first two bafflements we’ve known about for some time: The show is completely unrelated to the Arrowverse, unlike every other CW superhero show, even ones like Black Lightning and Stargirl that were brought into the Arrow multiverse during Crisis On Infinite Earths. Also, it shares the name with an upcoming video game that is also about a few of Batman’s adopted children investigating his murder, and it is also completely unrelated to that.

Are you sufficiently baffled yet? Well wait until you see the show’s first official trailer:

The whole thing plays like a parody of CW superhero shows, with fancy teens going through teen drama alongside set and costume designs that make Titans look like it has the budget of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, but you might not even catch the most baffling thing about it: Star Oscar Morgan, Batman’s son, is not playing Dick Grayson or Tim Drake or Jason Todd or Damian Wayne. He’s apparently playing “Turner Hayes,” a new character invented for this show. There are at least four “Batman’s son” characters that already exist and have fans! Why do this? It’s like Joseph Gordon-Levitt basically playing a Robin in The Dark Knight Rises, but he was just filling the Robin-type role in that universe. He didn’t literally have the exact backstory as several different characters in the Batman canon!

Plus, it’s not like Gotham Knights is opposed to pulling weird picks from the comics canon, with the rest of its core gang including Anna Lore as Stephanie Brown, Olivia Rose Keegan as Duela Dent (a.k.a. Joker’s Daughter), Navia Robinson as Carrie Kelley (the Dark Knight Returns Robin), Fallon Smythe as relative newcomer Harper Row, and Misha Collins as a decidedly normal-looking Harvey Dent. Most people don’t know most of those characters, but Gotham Knights is making a point to have Harper Row and not Dick Grayson?

And if the answer is “that would make this too similar to Titans,” then maybe that’s a sign? But whatever, we’re not the ones running the network. If we were, Legends Of Tomorrow would run longer than Gunsmoke.

 
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