Arrow co-creator Marc Guggenheim has opened up about the creative approach taken to help the show succeed, highlighting the creative team's ability to not only plan character arcs and story points for an entire season but also remain flexible enough to make changes along the way.
This "freedom to deviate" fed into their "combination of discipline and confidence", as he explained on Fake Nerd Podcast.
"It's particularly crazy when you think about just where we planned for the show to go right at the very beginning," said Guggenheim. "I've always been very honest about the fact that we always said that the show would not have superpowers and not have time travel and not have multiple realities -- and we ended up doing all that stuff! It just goes to show that, when you have a long-running show, you can have all the plans in the world but you don't necessarily have to stick with them."
Guggenheim credits the team's success to their ability to plot out everything across an entire season, yet remain open to better ideas when they came across them. Admitting the contradictory nature of their approach, he nonetheless believes the Arrow team's adherence to it gave them their "greatest assets."
As he put it, "I think, quite frankly, our two greatest assets as we were working on the show for eight years was -- and this may sound contradictory, but it was our discipline in terms of planning things... So it was always a combination of discipline and confidence, because I think you have to have a certain amount of confidence to be able to adjust your plan and a certain amount of confidence to deviate from your plan when you realize, 'Okay, there's a better idea here.'"
Arrow stars Stephen Amell as Oliver Queen, David Ramsey as John Diggle, Rick Gonzalez as Wild Dog, Juliana Harkavy as Black Canary, Katie Cassidy as Black Siren, Katherine McNamara as Mia Smoak, Joseph David-Jones as Connor Hawke and Ben Lewis as William Clayton-Queen.