Who was the guy who played Frankie (the lieutenant for Maroni) on tonight’s episode? Looked a LOT like the comedian Chris D’Elia (late of the series Whitney with Whitney Cummings), but a bit older. Pretty much a dead ringer for the guy, actually.
Danny Mastrogiorgio apparently!
Yup. They tempted us with it being darker in the previews, but it really is not. I have watched three episodes and I agree the actors and setting and are good, but I don’t find the scripts or the use of the setting all that clever or even interesting. The Cobblepot/Penguin origin seems like I have seen it before. Angry, put-upon loner, told to scram and then returns angrier to rise from nothing to a kingpin. The tired cop that is overwhelmed by the thoroughly corrupt police force and political system. Not new. Semi-crooked, but pragmatic other cop. Crime bosses who dance around each others motives knowing they hate other and things will soon explode. Meh. Bruce seems kinda thrown in as an afterthought in some of the episodes. Finally, the reason I gave up on most network crime dramas, bad guy of the week. We are introduced to him, slowly learn of him and then we get him in the end. I know that is essential for a lot of people as they want everything encapsulated in a week with a sprinkling of story arc in the background. I just do not have much patience any longer when the serialized shows have told better and much more interesting stories.
I mean, I guess it works as the origins as Gotham and its characters and maybe it seems like I have heard it all before because bits of it are familiar from all the Batman films and comics, but there has got to be something extra added. I really wanted to like this, but basically went in with relatively low expectations. Those were all that have been met thus far.
I’m still enjoying the show five episodes in. I’m shallow enough to enjoy watching the pretty people in each wrap-in-45-minutes crime drama while the more interesting larger storylines slowly start to play out. I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with the whole corruption-in-Wayne-Enterprises subplot; hopefully it involves Bruce finding Lucius Fox. I’m pretty glad they’re done with the “weapon training” scenes with Fish, though, as those were just horrible.
Speaking of pretty people, Makenzie Leigh has to be just about the cutest wee bee-stung-lipped hottie in the world atm. I was vaguely aware of her as a fashion model before, she seems to be making a good go at the acting malarkey now.
Still enjoying it, mainly for the sense of leisurely-assembled Batman villain menagerie - and I have to admit, leisurely-assembled young detective Batman too.
(Incidentally, did anyone else think the “comedian” Fish was interviewing in the first episode is going to be the Joker?)
I think the general hamminess works, I’ve seen this series from the beginning as trying to straddle the hamminess of the 60s show and the grimdark of the movies and the comics since the 80s. Not always successfully, true, but at least it’s trying.
“Freeze!!!”
Woman comes around corner and drops box.
“I just needed some paper clips…I didn’t think anyone would notice!!”
Woman runs from room crying.
Cut to cops looking let down and irritated.
That’s the kind of scene that makes me audibly groan and want more from the show. All the pieces are there and that is why I keep watching, but some of the dialog is too cliched.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding leisurely in this context but nothing about this show feels leisurely. It feels like they believe they are about to be canceled and need to jam everything in. It’s almost comical at times to the detriment of the show… nothing feels earned, it just happens to squeeze it in as fast as possible.
You also mentioned, as have others, straddling the campiness of the 60’s show and the darker tone set by more modern incarnations of Batman (and what was focused on in pre-release trailers for Gotham). I don’t get the need to keep the 60s Batman shit around at all, it was fucking terrible when it wasn’t getting you to laugh at it instead of laugh with it. That’s my personal beef, but that Adam West Batman has been an albatross around the property’s neck until Nolan took it over.
And while the overacting and dumb lines continue, Pinkett Smith being a pretty bad offender, it’s Bruce Wayne that’s killing the show for me. He needs to be a kid, not be Batman Boy detective. The fact that he’s going through company financials while building the cliche “Wall of Connections With Tacks And String” before he has pubic hair is both funny but-not-ha-ha-funny and painful to watch.
Having said that, I think I liked the most recent crazy strong gas one the most so far.
I like young Bruce a lot, myself. Batman is a man so driven by obsession that he’s almost as crazed as those he fights. It makes perfect psychological sense that said obsessions would manifest immediately after the trauma that caused them.
I don’t disagree with the idea, but he’s doing things like an adult Bruce Wayne who is Batman, not a kid who can’t even do algebra yet. He should be obsessed, or traumatized, or whatever, but he should also be 10 or whatever age he is. The show seems to want to be a Gotham origin story of sorts and be a Batman story. One definitely comes before the other.
It is on Fox.
I don’t have a problem with his age because the adult Bruce Wayne is supposed to be one of the greatest minds on Earth, if not the greatest. Precocity makes perfect sense when a genius of his magnitude is involved. The child is the father of the man.
I don’t disagree with this notion either but I feel like the greatest mind on earth needs cultivation. To me, this show is the raw form of the later solidified universe. In my mind, Bruce Wayne is already Batman in the show, he just happens to be 10. He should be Bruce Wayne, child genius with the emphasis on genius. I wanted Bruce Alfred to be the mentor relationship Bruce needs to be on his way. I liked Nolans training between Bruce and Liam Neeson. The potential will always be there. But Gotham should be about the journey bringing this stuff out. We are at the beginning of that journey but the show doesn’t really act like it most of the time except for maybe the riddler. Every other character already feels full formed at their destination.
Sorry I mean emphasis on child, not emphasis on genius. Tapatalk is giving me a hard time with the edit.
A good perspective, but it would require a long view to implement that’s probably not practical on network television. Gotham, the HBO series might be able to deliver what you want ;-).
I don’t get that sense, to me it seems they’re assembling Gordon and Penguin and (to a lesser extent) young-detective-Batman in this season, and the others are just occasionally glimpsed - “in reserve” as it were (i.e. just reminding you they’re there - like Riddler, Catwoman, etc.).
One example for me would be Penguin, getting “killed” and then coming back after what felt like only 5 minutes of having left Gotham. I’m not sure what I expected to happen, but I didn’t expect him to come back so fast after everything that happened getting out of the city. Then he immediately goes and gets a job for the mobster, then seems to quickly stage the robbery and get promoted literally to the top of that little outfit.
Bruce doesn’t mourn his parents outside what little he does in the first episode. Again I don’t know what I want to see him do (actually nothing to be honest, I wish Bruce wasn’t really in the show at this point), but he seems to quickly progress to looking through city and company records. He never has to learn how to scour for clues that forensic accounts would probably be needed to find in some cases, or he doesn’t need to mature at all to handle how Gotham’s criminal organizations are structured. I guess this sort of overlaps my complaint that we aren’t watching a Gotham origin story, we’re watching Gotham Muppet Babies.
You’re right, and what’s at the heart of it all is that Gotham isn’t the show I want it to be and, in my opinion, isn’t the show that was necessarily promised in the pre-release hype. Given that, I’ll probably keep watching it since my wife digs the show, but as for now, I’ll back out from this conversation because given my disagreements with the fundaments of this show, I don’t really have anything constructive to add as episodes air.
I’m kind of the opposite, I couldn’t understand the point of such a show and strongly disliked the idea of it, but I watched the first episode anyway, and was hooked.
I gather the idea of developing the backstories of all Batman’s villains was late to the table, but I think they must have quickly realized it’s a no-brainer, and that without it there really isn’t much there there. It’s not like any comics fan has ever seriously wondered what Commissioner Gordon was doing in the years before Batman. But a show developing the origins of each of Batman’s villians? Yes, that I can sign up to.
After all, Batman’s rogues’ gallery is just about the best of all superheroes’, so they can stretch this out for several seasons if they devote each season to one of them.
I just watched the Pilot episode (because it expires tomorrow on Hulu Plus, so I couldn’t delay it anymore).
Good stuff. I’m really surprised at the quality.
One bizarre side note: the episode has about 6 commercial breaks, and none of the usual Hulu Plus ads that I’m used to seeing showed up during Gotham. Instead, all the ads, every single one, were ads for charities. I guess they figure people who watch Gotham are very generous. But with 18 different charities vying for money during a single show, the effect was kind of the opposite. With so many good causes to give to, how do you pick one?
Back to the show itself: I love the actress they chose for the young Catwoman. You can totally see her growing up to be Michelle Pfieffer.
Well, this week’s episode felt like real filler. Other than a bit of insight into Bullock’s past with his ex-partner and all, it felt like nothing at all happened until the last 2 minutes. I suppose that’s not entirely fair, but since we knew the whole Penguin-ain’t-dead thing was coming to a head eventually, all the little stuff leading up to the big reveal in the station house had no real impact. Kept thinking, get on with it already. Oh, and please, no more of Nigma’s love life (or lack thereof).
Although the Goat thing was nicely done in and of itself, I thought the “kill the rich, corrupted of Gotham” thing was too much like the balloon man thing and the gas man thing. Can we have another theme already?
Otherwise, still enjoyable.