“Gotham” has its midseason finale Monday after getting off to a different start.
Last year, the Batman prequel TV series premiered on Fox with a bang before settling into familiar crime drama territory. But this season, the show seems to have pressed the fast-forward button, with crime bosses and stars rising and falling, and the city plummeting into a cesspool of corruption and violence.
In many ways, the show is grandiose and over the top. The staging helps add to that, as CNN saw firsthand with a tour of the show’s Brooklyn set.
With so many TV series, things look much bigger than they actually are, but in the case of Gotham City’s police station, that’s not the case.
The workplace of Detectives Jim Gordon and Harvey Bullock is incredibly detailed, right down to never-shown documents on police officers’ desks that say “Gotham City.” It’s little touches like that, the producers said, that help bring a sense of realism to the larger-than-life proceedings.
The living room of Wayne Manor and the apartment belonging to Edward Nygma (a.k.a. the Riddler) have depth and feel lived-in.
Arkham Asylum, where the many criminals of Gotham pay their debt to society, has a grimy feel.
“It’s part of the look that (pilot director) Danny Cannon wanted to establish,” executive producer John Stephens said. “We shoot with wide-angle lenses, and the wider the lenses, the more articulated you need to have your sets be, so we end up with a lot of sets like this.
“Some sets (for other series) have cardboard walls,” Stephens added. “These feel like they’re real. It also helps the actors to don the characters they have to play and brings some reality to it. It pays off in multiple ways.”
There’s even a “Batcave,” though it’s not called that yet.
“Gotham” was the second in what has been a wave of TV series based on DC Comics (a Time Warner company, like CNN). It’s since been joined by shows such as “The Flash” and “Supergirl.”
But this “Gotham,” being a prequel, stands on its own and works equally well for fans of the comics as it does for fans of mafia stories.
Stephens said it was a conscious decision by the producers to free themselves from a formula.
“Once we abandoned the classical police procedural framework, people started doing bad things to each other,” he said, including the unexpected death of the character Jerome, who many fans expected to grow up to be the Joker.
“We developed more the idea of arch-villains this year,” Stephens said. “We designed this year as one full story but breaks into two halves very evenly.
“A bomb gets dropped on everybody,” he added. “It’s going to be amazing.”
Viewers can expect to see two major characters from the comics this season, as well: Hugo Strange (played by B.D. Wong) and Azrael.
“He’s a proto-Batman. He wears a cowl and fights crime but also kills people,” serving as a warning to Bruce, according to Stephens.
And as this saga continues, viewers can look forward as much to the distinct “Gotham”-esque look of new locations, just as much as the new characters.
