Will Supergirl and Flash Crossover Again

Photo: Katie Yu/The CW

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The Arrowverse is struggling. Tin can its creators rebuild?

The CW'due south pocket-size-screen superhero universe is 1 of the best comic book adaptations, which means it also has comic book bug

By Jun 20, 2021, 9:30am EDT

There's a CW drama formula. Most of the network'due south shows are congenital around a main graphic symbol who is kind of normal, until something unusual happens. Perchance a South Fifty.A. high school football histrion is suddenly recruited to play for a posh Beverly Hills school (All-American), or a higher pupil learns that she and her sisters are really witches (Charmed) or a young woman that returns to her hometown discovers that her onetime crush is actually an alien (Roswell, New Mexico). On The CW, characters constantly win a lottery they didn't know they played, and learn that winning more often than not yields more problems than they had before — which means more drama for the viewer to relish, and hopefully follow for nearly seven seasons.

This is also the internal combustion engine that fuels superhero comics, where a normal lad might exist bitten by a radioactive spider, or a teen discovers puberty comes with eye lasers and blue fur. The realization that these two forms of storytelling aren't just like, but exactly the same, has yielded one of the about successful genre Tv set enterprises since Star Expedition: The CW's Arrowverse. The small-screen take on DC superheroes kicked off with 2011'south Arrow and, hundreds of episodes later, is nevertheless going strong with four currently airing serial all gear up in the aforementioned sprawling Boob tube universe.

But since the cease of its ambitious 2019 crossover, Crisis on Infinite Earths, the Arrowverse has been in a rough period of transition, bucking against the weight of its ain history and continuity. Whether or not it comes out the other side intact, the multi-pronged franchise will go down as perhaps the most accurate adaptation of the comic book experience in another medium. Phenomenal success and catastrophic failure are both part of that experience, and both options seem plausible for the Arrowverse.

Currently, The CW's DC universe comprises five shows: The Flash is the elderberry statesman of the bunch, ambulation its seventh season; Legends of Tomorrow, which follows a shifting cast of time-traveling heroes led by Sarah Lance/The White Canary is in its sixth season; Supergirl, now on mid-season hiatus for its sixth and final season; Batwoman, which is in the middle of its 2d flavour; and Superman & Lois, well into its first. Adding to the count are the three shows that accept come up to an cease: Pointer, which ended in early 2020 with eight seasons under its hood, Black Lightning, which wrapped upwardly in early 2021 with 4, and Constantine, an NBC serial that retroactively became a role of the Arrowverse when its star, magician John Constantine, joined Legends of Tomorrow in its tertiary flavor .

This is a tremendous level of sprawl that would be exhausting if every viewer felt obligated to watch every series, and to the credit of the various writers and producers of the Arrowverse, they're generally non. Withal, regular multi-part crossovers have been a nigh-annual occurrence in the Arrowverse, which makes keeping up feel at least a picayune encouraged, fifty-fifty while the events are self-independent. Sprawl and the repetitive nature of how each series is built are probably the biggest bug facing The CW's stable of superhero shows — when someone does watch them all, the seams offset to show. And for a long time, they all kind of felt the aforementioned thank you to a symptom of The CW formula.

Teen soaps, but weirder

On a teen-soap budget, superheroes have to stay relatively grounded. Equally suggested past Fable of Tomorrow star Nick Zano in a recent interview, the powerset of a graphic symbol who can plow his peel to steel is besides "expensive" to use on the regular in network Television receiver. By necessity, the heart of an Arrowverse show must exist drama, non action. Comic books do non share this limitation, merely as a serialized story, superhero comics also have to lean into this, and build out rich supporting casts effectually heroes similar Batman, Spider-Human being, and the X-Men, chronicling their friendships, romances, and divorces. A wedding ceremony, it turns out, is a great way to get lots of attention from a lot of people in just about any context.

In order to make the drama feel distinct, the showrunners behind the Arrowverse tried to assemble dramatically unlike casts of characters — simply it proved to be a struggle. Pointer set a template: Over time, the hero of a given series builds out their ain team — there'south someone to do tech support (Felicity on Arrow, Cisco on The Flash, Luke Fox on Batwoman, etc), along with another costumed hero or 2 to support or serve as mentee — and the assembled crew serves as extra-judicial crimefighters covering their city. The differences, then, became tonal. Arrow was grim and didn't actually characteristic superpowers, while The Wink was brilliant and infused with the fantastic. Supergirl continued the trend, having its hero piece of work with the regime's Department of Extranormal Operations, but suffusing the series with a strong focus on LGBTQ characters and plots that often featured aliens as an immigration metaphor, striving for real-world relevance in a mode its predecessors did not. Then Legends of Tomorrow skipped a few steps and had a time traveler gather a random assortment of supporting players together from the other Arrowverse shows to accept them proceed adventures together.

The premiere of Legends of Tomorrow is the moment where the Arrowverse felt a little ridiculous and, perhaps, stretched too thin. Ironically, it's too the prove that would show the way forwards for the universe. Betwixt fans and the cast of Legends themselves, anybody seems to concur that the show didn't detect itself until the 3rd season, where everyone involved realized that the show they actually wanted to make wasn't a drama, merely a comedy. From that betoken on, Legends became the nigh consistently fun and inventive prove in the Arrowverse stable, an irreverent take on Doctor Who where just about anything tin can happen. Normally, anything does: a Furby-esque toy becomes a behemothic kaiju, a psychic gorilla tries to kill a college-historic period Barack Obama, and George Lucas, in danger of never making the movies that made him famous, has to be persuaded to become a filmmaker.

Photo: The CW

Legends doesn't take a stable bandage — outside of a handful of stalwarts, characters come and go regularly — but it ironically has the strongest identity, precisely because it'due south not leaning on a key superhero. This is the flim-flam that makes Superman & Lois a surprise success; the focus isn't really on Superman, but on building a warm Everwood-style family drama. While Black Lightning's place in the Arrowverse is complicated given that it took place in a separate universe until late in its terminal seasons — an all-around awkward look for The CW and DC's first alive-action serial starring a Black superhero — the showrunners also tucked its superheroics inside a family drama, and using the superhero metaphor to explore the fictional community of Freeland, Georgia.

Compared to these more recent efforts, The Flash and Supergirl experience pretty run-of-the mill, even a little dated, most like watching a Stargate evidence of yore. Supergirl's cancellation — which, according to reports, is due to sinking ratings and pandemic-related delays in production — means the former prove is the but remaining series however operating in the relatively anodyne space Arrow did. Across its seven seasons, The Flash has embraced both the absurd and impenetrable parts of its comic book roots, and equally a result, is a good example of a show that has more or less lost what was appealing about the Arrowverse to begin with: it stopped feeling like a CW show.

Feared and misunderstood

A decade ago, when Arrow premiered, the show's creators weren't necessarily trying to distance the series from comic books or the MCU, just Smallville. The teen soap nigh a pre-Superman Clark Kent wasn't but one of the about successful pocket-size-screen takes on superheroes at the time, simply too the beginning alive-action iteration of Oliver Queen/Dark-green Arrow, played by Justin Hartley in the latter five of the testify's ten seasons. It had too just ended the yr before Pointer premiered, and the new show had to overcompensate to distinguish itself with grimness and characters that felt a bit more "adult."

But despite its aggro aspirations, Arrow was a CW show through and through. At its creative peak in season ii, the serial embraced its iv-color source textile and broadcast dwelling in equal measure, dialing upward both the soap operatics and vigilante action. This was, and remains, the pleasure of the Arrowverse — seeing superheroes where they arguably belong, on a network that specializes in the same kind of lowbrow pulpy fair that is every bit eschewed past a critical establishment that prides itself on its more refined tastes.

Currently, anyone with this mindset would be torn betwixt vindication and a legitimately interesting shift that might change their minds. In some ways, the Arrowverse is starting to splinter in a skillful way, rebuilding so that each show in the lineup feels like a CW drama with a unique arroyo to adding capes to the formula.

Superman & Lois naturally has an easier time of it, as the newest series with a mission to experience singled-out from its predecessors. Its first season is a surprisingly heartfelt family unit drama show virtually Superman and Lois Lane leaving Metropolis to focus on raising their teen sons, one of which is developing superpowers. The comic-booky stuff is there in the form of a mysterious stranger with an axe to grind with Superman, simply crucially, it all takes a backseat to the Kent family, and what they find upon their render to Smallville. This allows Superman & Lois to non just be a family unit drama, but a family drama about relevant things: Like the decline of local news, the rapacious expansion of private equity into local communities, and the disillusionment of blue-neckband Americans who and so become exploited by opportunistic billionaires.

As a 6-twelvemonth veteran of the Arrowverse, Legends of Tomorrow'southward turnaround is hands the most impressive and improved prove, an statement for not throwing out the Arrowverse babe with the overly complex bathwater. The series cycles through cast members with uncommon regularity, and at the end of this season it will lose Dominic Purcell, who has played Heat Moving ridge every bit a member of the main cast since flavour ane.

In the meantime, though? The series is doing what information technology does best, introducing a bonkers flavour-long arc that allows for interesting standalone episodes along the way. The latest season kicked off with the misfit time travelers lying low in the 1970s, only to notice out from David Bowie (Thomas Nicholson, charmingly not a spitting image of the man) that Sara Lance (Caity Lotz, one of the just other cast members still around from season 1) was abducted past aliens — but earlier she was near to suggest to her girlfriend. The result is a blast, fifty-fifty if y'all haven't been watching the testify for a while, just a goofball proficient fourth dimension with B-Movie aliens and globetrotting comedy on a tiny, tiny, TV budget that adds to the charm.

The continued success of Legends makes the current flavor of The Flash absolutely painful to get through, as its current season is bogged down in continuity-heavy drama that also has to business relationship for main cast departures, new introductions, and a deficit of the charm it once had. Season 7'southward overarching plot requires a working knowledge of deep Flash lore, introducing a new personification of the Speed Force that gives the Wink his powers, equally well as 3 other "Forces" and their corresponding avatars — a development that has its earliest roots in 2019 Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover. In other words: the show is bulletproof.

Batwoman is the biggest wrinkle, a show that feels similar it errs a picayune too far on the side of "superhero" in the CW/Superhero continuum, merely because of the high expectations of annihilation Batman-next. With its lead part recast this flavor, the focus shifts from a white queer woman with a armed forces background (Ruby Rose'south Kate Kane) to new protagonist Ryan Wilder (Javicia Leslie) who is Black, queer, and unhoused at the start — an try by the writers and producers to be more than socially aware than other Arrowverse shows at their starts. But considering of that forced refocusing, Batwoman feels like the shakiest show, trying to do correct by its new protagonist but besides trying to continue its continuity ducks in a row — a major subplot this flavour is the mystery of what happened to the get-go Batwoman.

None of these shows are showing a hint of crossing over, giving them the space to thrive or flounder in their own identities. Granted, there is a soft thread running through the Arrowverse in the coming weeks — one-time Pointer graphic symbol John Diggle (David Ramsey) will be appearing in a mysterious chapters on each evidence — but it sounds less like a crossover than a reminder that these shows all take identify in the same world. Bluntly, that'due south what the Arrowverse needs right now: Less ambitious crossovers, more stories virtually people nosotros intendance about. There is naught left for superhero media to show — only that it can tell stories well-nigh a wider spectrum of people in all sorts of means that experience accurate and relevant.

American superhero comics were notoriously not built to concluding. They were disposable things that, cheers to fourth dimension and passion and exploitation, accept grown in stature to where they sit now. Nearly a hundred years after Superman, they — or more accurately, the corporations that own them — drive the civilization. But no matter how satisfying the next blockbuster movie volition be, information technology will always be an odd fit for superheroes. To people like me, they'll always be at their best in places where most folks aren't looking, because they don't find it worthy of their attention. Superheroes can make for swell prestige fare, sure but they're better off when they're a little misunderstood and meeting people where they're at — whether that's comic books, the manga section of Barnes and Noble, or alongside CW soap operas.

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Source: https://www.polygon.com/entertainment/22539110/flash-supergirl-superman-lois-arrowverse-episodes-problem

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