With their episodic, crisis-of-the-week approach to storytelling, you’d think that comic books would have found their natural visual media outlet in television, rather than in the numerous film adaptations which continue to net big bucks for major publishers like Marvel and DC. The wealth of elaborate backstory and character development in most long-running comics can only be hinted at in a two-hour movie, with no opportunity to slowly build complex story-arcs in the way that a variety of TV shows on networks like HBO and AMC have recently done so well. But despite this fact, the only notable success story of televisual superheroics in recent years has been the The CW network’s Superman adaptation Smallville, whose tenth and final season ended last year. Other recent attempts at bringing superheroes to the small screen, such as 2002’s Birds of Prey, 2006’s Blade: The Series and 2011’s Wonder Woman have all died a quick death, due either to network apathy or sharply declining ratings during their first season. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that for such a seemingly risky venture as a new superhero TV series, The CW have chosen a hero who’ll be familiar to Smallville viewers after appearing as a supporting character on that show, but who is also obscure enough to feel fresh to casual fans of superheroics. This character is of course none other than Oliver Queen, better known as his alter-ego Green Arrow.
The premise of Arrow is simple; after being stranded on a remote island for five years, billionaire playboy Oliver Queen returns to his family in Starling City a changed man. Having (mysteriously) developed a range of deadly combat skills during his time in the wilderness, as well as an impressive proficiency with bow and arrow, Queen sets about dispensing vigilante justice to a group of corrupt and exploitative businessmen, whose hold over the city has become so strong that even the police can’t touch them. In order to protect those close to him, Queen disguises himself in a hooded green costume during his nightly excursions, and continues to act the part of a hedonistic rich-kid when in public, all the while trying to find a way to reconnect with the family who spent five years thinking he was dead.
Two episodes of Arrow have now aired in the UK, and we can begin to get some sort of idea about the series’ take on the character of Green Arrow. In general, the show has thus far been of a reasonably high quality. The acting has ranged from passable to powerful (bolstered by the presence of veteran Brit thesps Colin Salmon and Paul Blackthorne), with Stephen Amell doing a good line in brooding intensity as the eponymous crime fighter, and the action sequences are engaging and generally well-shot. There are, however, two areas where the show falters slightly; first, in its depiction of the Queen family’s home life, which has veered too close to soap opera on several occasions, and second (and more importantly) in its depiction of Oliver Queen himself.
The Green Arrow familiar to readers of DC comics originally began in 1941 as little more than a Batman analogue with a bow and arrow, until writer Denny O’Neil’s celebrated reinvention of the character in the 1970s. O’Neil refashioned Oliver Queen as a wealthy hedonist who develops a passion for social justice and left-wing politics after his own fortune is taken from him and he comes to better appreciate the plight of the poorest members of society. In the decades since, these polemical views have come to define the character, moving him further away from being simply a Batman clone while simultaneously bringing him in line with the philosophy of Robin Hood, the legend which also inspired both the character’s costume and his choice of weapon. But even a change as innocuous as the omission of the word ‘green’ from Arrow‘s title seems to indicate that the show is striving to be darker than its comic book origins, and early episodes confirm that the template for the show’s take on Oliver Queen owes more to the gritty realism of Christopher Nolan’s Batman than it does to DC’s Green Arrow.
This is hardly surprising; Nolan’s Batman films have been runaway critical and commercial successes, so it makes sense that DC (and The CW) would attempt to replicate this success on the small screen by applying Nolan’s stylistic palette to a different character, one little-known enough to act as a blank slate. The problem is, such an approach is in danger of once again reducing Green Arrow (on screen, at least) to little more than a Bat-clone, and a morally dubious one at that. While the Oliver Queen of the comics is a principled, compassionate man defined by his politics, the TV version kills his enemies’ henchmen without a second thought, and wages war against the capitalist criminals of Starling City not out of a desire for social justice per se, but to atone for the sins of his dead father, who was once among their number. In making Oliver Queen an ice-cold killer driven by a personal vendetta, the show’s writers run the risk of creating a character too dark to elicit audience sympathy, as well as straying too far from his comic book origins. Of course, there’s no reason why the show’s creators should slavishly adhere to all the conventions of the character’s print history, but if they plan to strip Green Arrow of the essential elements that make the character who he is, then the use of his name begins to seem cynically cosmetic; merely an attempt to cash in on the character’s pre-existing fanbase. Arrow, while far from perfect, is a thoroughly entertaining TV series, and therefore deserving of your attention. But only time will tell whether the show’s writers will do enough to give Oliver Queen an identity of his own, and make him more than just Batman with a bow.
‘Arrow’ is currently airing on Sky1, Mondays at 8pm.
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