We won’t get to see Matt Reeves’ The Batman for a long time, but Warner Bros. is still banking on the film being enough of a success to justify and HBO Max tie-in series about Gotham City’s police department. We first heard about this plan over the summer, though all we knew at the time was that Boardwalk Empire’s Terrence Winter would serve as showrunner and that the series would “build upon The Batman’s examination of the anatomy of corruption in Gotham City.” (So, spoiler alert, apparently The Batman will examine the anatomy of corruption in Gotham City.)
Now, there’s been a behind-the-scenes change for the series, which will apparently be called Gotham PD (to differentiate it from Fox’s Gotham and the Gotham Central comic book, presumably). According to Variety, Winter is no longer part of Gotham PD, and he’s been replaced by Joe Barton—creator of Giri/Haji and the writer of Netflix’s The Ritual (about a group of friends with dark secrets who accidentally stumble onto some supernatural Swedish nightmares while camping). It’s hard to say how this will impact Gotham PD at all, since we barely know anything about The Batman, but Barton does have an interestingly brief-yet-eclectic résumé. Who better to write a show about cops in Gotham City than a guy who worked on a World War I documentary, and a comedy about British teens working at an American summer camp, and a movie about a guy getting superpowers after his phone gets lodged in his brain during a shooting, and a romantic drama about the death penalty that was hand-picked by stars Kata Mara and Elliot Page.