Fox’s upcoming Batman prequel series Gotham has been generating a ton of fan interest because of its heavy focus on the Dark Knight’s extensive rogues gallery, who appear to be just as front-and-center in the series as its main protagonist, the young up-and-coming detective James Gordon.
Showing us early incarnations of these villains will be no easy feat, and is hopefully something the writers and showrunners will approach cautiously. It will be all too easy for them to throw in all kinds of easter eggs, fan-service cameos and winks at the audience; but luckily it seems like they’ve got a plan that will stray away from that.
Executive producer Bruno Heller (Rome, The Mentalist) was present at the Television Critics Association press tour on Sunday, and answered some questions about two of Batman’s most famous and beloved villains, the Joker and Poison Ivy.
A recent report suggested that we’d be seeing a Joker tease in each and every episode, but according to Heller, their methods of toying with the audience won’t go quite that far:
“We will be playing with… Not just with the Joker. Half the fun with all of these characters is who is going to turn into what and when? Certainly the Joker is a good example. In the pilot, you see there’s a comedian there. People immediately leap… And that’s really letting the audience do our work for us. Because I haven’t said anything about the guy and people go there!
Yeah, we’ll play with that down the line. Not over the course of one season, no, because people will still get tired of that. ‘Is that the Joker? Is that the Joker?’ No. In a subtle way, we’ll be doing that and hopefully we’ll fool them in the end.”
So, it seems like the plan for the Joker is more long-term than we thought. Frankly this is good, because he’s the one villain that could easily be botched, which would completely alienate the fans and likely ruin the entire show for them.
They aren’t just looking into the future for the Joker, but will be applying long-game storytelling techniques for other characters as well, notably the young Ms. Ivy Pepper, the future Poison Ivy. Some fans have noticed (begrudgingly) that her name is different than in the comics. In the books, Ivy’s real name is Pamela Isley. They’ve kept other characters’ names, like Oswald Cobblepot, Selina Kyle, and Edward Nigma intact, so why change Ivy’s?
“It’s really about being able to tell the secret histories of these stories. If you just re-tell stories exactly as they’ve been told before, whilst you’re being true to the created mythology, you’re not really adding anything to it. So you have to find ways of finding more. And in this case, we’ve set up a situation in which Ivy Pepper, her mom is sick, her dad is dead… She’s going to go to the orphanage. And she’s a nice young girl; relatively undamaged. And she will find people to adopt her. And then we will start on the Poison Ivy story that people are familiar with.”
Heller didn’t elaborate on Ivy’s story, but it’s clear to see that maybe she’ll have a bigger role in the series than we originally thought. The marketing has made her presence in the show seem like fan service, but perhaps there will be more to her story than the various trailers and TV spots have led us to believe.
Gotham is set to premiere on FOX on Monday, September 22nd, with Ben McKenzie (The O.C.) starring as Detective Jim Gordon alongside Sean Pertwee (Dog Soldiers) as Alfred Pennyworth, Donal Logue (Sons of Anarchy) as Harvey Bullock, newcomer Camren Bicondova as Selina Kyle, David Mazouz (Touch) as Bruce Wayne, Robin Lord Taylor (Another Earth) as Oswald Cobblepot, Cory Michael Smith (Olive Kitteridge) as Edward Nygma, Jada Pinkett Smith (The Matrix) as Fish Mooney, Clare Foley (Sinister) as Ivy Pepper, Zabryna Guevara (The Guilt Trip) as Detective Essen, Victoria Cartagena (Salt) as Renee Montoya, Andrew Stewart Jones (The Tomorrow People) as Crispus Allen, Erin Richards (Being Human) as Barbara Kean, Drew Powell (Malcolm in the Middle) as Butch Gilzean, Kyle Massey (That’s So Raven, Cory in the House) as Macky and Carol Kane (Annie Hall) as Gertrud Kapelput. Watch the first trailer here.
Source: IGN TV
Originally published July 21, 2014. Updated December 13, 2019.
