The recently announced HBO Max spinoff from The Batman director Matt Reeves and Boardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter is said to highlight the trials and tribulations of th Gotham City Police Department. While at first blush, this may seem like just another version of Fox's Gotham, the upcoming HBO Max series -- which will be set in the same world as The Batman and Robert Pattinson's Caped Crusader -- has the potential to be so much more.
Created and developed by Bruno Heller (Rome, The Mentalist), Gotham ran from 2014 until 2019 and served as a prequel to the Batman story we all know and love. The show focused on young detective James Gordon's struggles to fight crime with rogues filling the titular city's streets, while an orphaned Bruce Wayne grew and matured into a familiar cowl. On paper, the HBO Max series' focus GCPD is just a different take on a subject that had the spotlight up to a year ago.
The difference, however, is in the execution. The first season of Gotham stayed somewhat grounded, as crime was concentrated around mob bosses Carmine Falcone and Fish Mooney. However, as the episodes went on, the focus changed from the police and onto the rogues. Familiar characters such as the Penguin, the Riddler, Solomon Grundy and Poison Ivy began to steal the spotlight away from the more subtle criminals. Heller even did his own take on Batman's biggest enemy, with Jerome and Jeremiah Valeska serving as "Proto-Jokers."
Additionally, these characters got involved in grandiose schemes that bordered on ludicrous by the end of the show's 100-episode run. Gone were the days of seeing a dark world that needed a vigilante to keep it held together. Instead, grandiose supervillain plots and over the top theatrics dominated. One could even say the schemes on Gotham wouldn't feel out of place in the fluorescent quippy Gotham in the late Joel Schumacher's critically panned Batman films.
The press release for the new HBO Max show states it will "build upon the motion picture's examination of the anatomy of corruption in Gotham City, ultimately launching a new Batman universe across multiple platforms." This provides hope the HBO Max show won't just be a Gotham retread for many reasons. A focus on the "anatomy of corruption" seems to indicate a breakdown of the Gotham crime system, from the street thugs to the big bosses. Batman's rogues' gallery can be described as a lot of things, but their correlation to corruption is not as robust. Additionally, if the intention is indeed to have this be the first in a series of shows, that puts less pressure on Reeves and Winter to have to address the big-name characters in on their first outing.
Speaking of Winter, his presence is another hopeful sign for this new series. When it comes to crime in fiction, he's a go-to guy. Winter built a name for himself writing 25 episodes of The Sopranos, winning multiple Emmys for his work and penning the infamous "Pine Barrens" episode. He then went on to create and serve as the head writer for Boardwalk Empire, which focused on bootlegging and other illegal activities during the Prohibition era. He was also nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay of The Wolf of Wall Street, which depicts the true story of Jordan Belfort's dealings with massive corruption and fraud while rocketing to the top of Wall Street.
Winter specializes in building out a corrupt community and giving personalities to criminals small and large. With the spinoff in his hands, we can see what Gotham wanted to be. This is finally an opportunity to build out the world of Gotham, sans Batman, and to see a city slipping under the surface as crime consumes it inch by inch.
Directed and co-written by Matt Reeves, The Batman stars Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Andy Serkis, Colin Farrell, Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright, John Turturro, Jayme Lawson and Peter Sarsgaard. The film arrives in theaters on Oct. 1, 2021.