There’ve been plenty of Batman TV shows over the years, both animated and live-action. But Fox’s Gotham is probably one of the more out there series: a prequel focused on Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie) investigating the Waynes’ murder while Bruce himself (David Mazouz) is just a kid? And his future Rogues Gallery is either around his age or young adults?
Despite that odd premise, things paid off. Gotham had a solid five-year run spanning 100 episodes, a prequel series in Pennyworth: The Origin of Batman’s Butler, and a passionate fanbase that still has affection for it. Ahead of the show’s 10-year anniversary on September 22, IGN published a lengthy retrospective on the series featuring interviews with the core cast, creator Bruno Heller, and executive producer (and recurring director/writer) Danny Cannon. As Heller explains it, the show came about after Warner Bros. and CBS passed on his legal drama The Advocates (which also starred McKenzie), and he was considering what to pitch next. He’d settled on a Batman series because the character was so TV-ready, but he said his son Felix (an avid comics reader) helped him realize the show should focus on Gordon rather than Batman himself.
“From that, a young detective investigating the Wayne murders was a natural concentration of ideas,” said Heller. “As soon as that notion hit, that he was the cop that investigates the death of the Waynes…The whole series is right there. It’s Batman as a boy, the origin stories of all those characters like the Joker and the Riddler and the Penguin, but as young people.”
Cannon said Heller had two firm ideas for the first season: Gordon trying to keep his promise to Bruce to investigate the Wayne murders, and the story of Penguin’s (Robin Lord Taylor) rise to power. “You had one kid’s journey losing his parents, and you had this other kid who had nothing,” he told IGN. “One was going to build his life up with his butler and with Jim Gordon, and look into his parents’ death and become inquisitive. […] And this other one, the only way he could become a man and become the person he wanted to be was by treading on the skulls of the dead, and making it happen for himself in a nefarious way.”
Making anything Batman-related comes with a lot of baggage, and there was understandable secrecy around the show starting out. Most of the cast admitted they didn’t initially realize they were even trying out for a Batman show to begin with. While McKenzie was told by Heller that Gordon was written with him in mind, Sean Pertwee (Alfred) learned in a conversation with Heller and Cannon just before the audition; and it fully clicked for Camren Bicondova (Selina Kyle) the moment she was told she got the part. “I think they said, ‘You’re Catwoman,’ but the first thing they said was ‘meow.’ And I was like, ‘What? I don’t understand,’” she recalled.
Like McKenzie, Mazouz knew he was auditioning for Bruce, even as he admitted to not remembering how he learned that information. Heller claims he was at the top of their list “pretty early on,” and Cannon considered it lucky that Mazouz was a lead on Fox’s two-season series Touch, whose creators recommended him to Cannon and Heller. Mazouz landed the part in early 2014, and he recalled being his Bar Mitzvah and seeing his friends with Batman on their clothes. That moment, he said, marked the first time it really landed for him that he was going to be Batman, regardless of whether or not he’d don the suit.
Looking back on Gotham, its cast and crew have fond memories of working on the series. Pertwee said he does his best to keep in contact with his former costars, and many consider it a show that just couldn’t be made these days. Taylor noted a 22-episode, big budget superhero show “doesn’t sound like a thing coming back anytime soon” on network TV, to say nothing of the freedom it had to play around with the Batman mythos on a weekly basis. “We showed we were able to play with canon and to play with these classic storylines in a way that was brave in many ways and also unexpected by many fans. Ultimately, [it’ll] prove to be just an endlessly refreshing take on these stories that have been around for 80 years.”
Bicondova said the show “brought an edge to comic book stories” you couldn’t find in other shows back then, or even now. Pertwee echoed that sentiment and believed people would find elements of the show that were “correct” and “humanized the craziness” of the Batman corner of the DC universe. Speaking to those characters, he added the show’s backstories on Batman and his rogues would reverberate through other incarnations across media.
McKenzie paid respect to other DC shows in the years since, but believed Gotham was “quite different from a lot of the others that existed then and now. Without Gotham, I don’t know that they would be making a show about the Penguin,” said McKenzie. “[It’s] a testament to both Robin’s portrayal, but also to showing that you can make what’s essentially, at least PG-13, if not R-rated show on network television by not dumbing it down to the audience, by keeping the plot lines intricate, the characters three dimensional. I’d like to think that we pushed the ball forward there.”
“The legacy of a show is, did people enjoy doing it, and did they walk away feeling like they were treated well and they had a good time, and that they’ve made friends with people and they feel proud?” said Heller. “[Gotham] is a tiny part of a massive Batman mythology.” Likening Batman to a saint of pop culture, he said he “hope we did justice [and] took it seriously enough to honor that, and took it with enough lightness to make it work as a TV show.”
You can read the full tell-all on Gotham here, which covers the show’s production design, embracing the more superhero side of Batman, and more. While you’re here, look back on Gotham and its whole Gotham-ness in the comments below.
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