REBOOT: How Would You Do the Cancelled Shows Differently?

I’m happy with the 20-22 episode seasons, but I’d scrap the serialized big bad story and just do villain of the week all the time. Superhero procedurals, in other words.

For Legends, go back to Season 1, get a more comics-accurate actor to play Vandal Savage (I keep thinking of a younger Undertaker), and lose both the love triangle stories around Hawkgirl (one with Savage and the other with Ray). Clean up the Hawk romance so it’s more organic and less creepy.

Going forward, keep with the all 2-parters format they used in S1, to save set design money that they can then use on special effects. Let Ray be The Atom more often. Let Zari wear her Isis outfit more than once. Let more team members join the crossovers. AND, do more with historical DC characters! They visited WWI at least 3 times and never met Enemy Ace! They went back to the Revolution and didn’t meet Tomahawk! There’s a wealth of stuff they could throw in as Easter eggs if they took the time and chose to do so.
Batwoman: do something with Stephanie Brown. They introduced her as a potential love interest for Luke (ignore the promo shot, they did a great job with her I thought), never brought her back and then wrapped it up in a “it’s too hard dating when you’re a superhero” short story in the Earth Prime special.

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Good ideas.

I thought she was Vixen?

You do know the reason Zari never wore her Isis suit or was even called Isis, correct?

Amaya was Vixen.

Sorry

The way to reboot any canceled DC show or any CBM TV series is to jettison the over-used, over-extended, enough already, serialized storytelling. I am done with the “big bad” of the season. I have had my full of extended, padded, decompressed narratives! There is never a satisfying payoff, and usually, it just bleeds into the next season. Return to episodic storytelling; take a page out of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds playbook. Give me a full story (with a beginning, a middle, and an end) each week, while maintaining interesting character throughlines that will pay off in the future.
Super-Heroes have vast rogues galleries that would make episodic storytelling a no-brainer. Stop stringing your audience along with boring back stories for subordinate characters. Instead, deliver action-oriented narratives that thrill and inform the fans by putting the titular characters front and center. I simply can not take any more Allegra, Chunk, and Sue Dibny-centric stories in a show entitled The Flash. It’s the 'slowest" show on Network TV.
This is the great failure of the recent CW shows, ever-burgeoning ensembles that just take all the juice out of the shows.
How would I reboot the canceled DC TV shows? I would streamline the casts, get rid of all the damn computers, and ramp up the action in a weekly episodic format.

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So, villain of the week

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Presumably (I don’t know that it was ever confirmed) they never used the name because of the so-called Islamic State. I’m not sure that that explains Tala only wearing the costume once (I’m not sure now if it was in the one where they went to Ray’s childhood home, or when Mick was time traveling to catch up on Lita’s childhood), or their deliberately melting down the amulet (which looked just like the Filmation version) in the Salem episode. So if you know more, please elaborate.

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No, they confirmed it pretty much as soon as they introduced Zari.

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Villain of the week, (or short episode arcs) with subplots, and story beats where certain actions and events dictate a shift in tone when it adds to the narrative. Basically, Stan Lee’s run on The Amazing Spider-Man.

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Yes, exactly. Each one of the DC heroes had at least a dozen regular villains to choose from and we barely saw three at most. We can do two parters with cliffhanger episodes like they used to do on the old Adam West Batman series, but no season or two season archs.

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@nathenleeturner.16315: Yes, multiple baddies and multiple cliffhangers with the hero(es) in constant peril!! What a concept! Right?

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I would do the cancellation a little differently. I’d call up Lou Scheimer and I’d bellow “You incompetent worm! You and your Batmite show are finished!” and then I’d slam the receiver down while he was still on the line. And then I’d order all the episodes to be gathered up and burned in my fireplace and I’d order Lou to sit next to me and perform the voice of Batmite being roasted alive as I gazed into the flames

I think the topic is asking how you would fix the shows?

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Sorry. I will take a crack at that

For Batwoman, I think it all rides on just having an actress that wasn’t going to jump ship. I think, at the time of Crisis on Infinite Earths, Batwoman was anything but a lost cause, though it was getting bashed more than other shows. Keeping Rachel around for the whole run seemed like a mistake - seemed to underscore to the audience that “this is the best thing we’ve got”. I would set it in some city other than Gotham, so that it didn’t have to have the crazy Bruce is Gone aspect.

what about if Kate was trying to find Bruce?

The problem there is it becomes a story arc that covers the whole season and that is what we are trying to avoid. Having Bruce around, even if disabled gives Kate someone who can give her advice and access to Batman’s backgrounds on known Gotham criminals.

Fair. Wonder why they never used Kate in “Gotham”

Kate’s rarely used anywhere, Bruce is supposed to be an orphan, yet he still has family, he could’ve easily been raised by the Kanes, a bit of a plot hole, haha!