Earlier this week, word broke that pay cable Epix has ordered a drama about Alfred Pennyworth's younger days, starting with his time in the British secret service. Pennyworth, which is not at all connected to the currently running pre-Batman show Gotham, which also features Bruce Wayne's butler in a prominent role, has been ordered directly to series.

The question is... why?

Not, "Why make a show about Alfred," mind you. Alfred's awesome, and one of the best parts of Gotham has been seeing the relationship between Sean Pertwee's Alfred and David Mazouz's Bruce Wayne grow. No, our question was more like, "Why does Hollywood keep wanting to tell Batman stories before Batman was around?"

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To begin with, we have to look back... to Smallville. Still the longest-running superhero show in history, the show was developed by Tollin/Robbins Productions -- but only after a series called Bruce Wayne was unexpectedly shelved.

smallville

Developed by Iron Giant screenwriter Tim McCanlies, Wayne reportedly would have focused on 17 year old Bruce being brought back to Gotham City by Alfred and, finding threats on his life from unknown enemies and even friends, find that Detective James Gordon is the only one he can trust. Planned to run for five or six seasons, Bruce Wayne would have been a flagship show for The WB, then reeling from losing Buffy the Vampire Slayer to UPN. Shawn Ashmore (aka the original Iceman from X-Men) was in talks to star as Bruce.

However, while the Internet would later react to a leaked script of the pilot with enthusiasm, the show was shelved by Warner Bros. in favor of the Batman: Year One film Darren Aronofsky was then developing (that ultimately got cancelled). But picking up a similar concept for Clark Kent, Alfred Gough and Miles Miller pitched Smallville to Tollin/Robbins, and the rest is history.

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Fast forward to October 2008. The WB and UPN had put aside their differences and merged into The CW. Smallville was still hanging on, but seeing which way the winds were blowing for superheroes post-Iron Man, The CW wanted to stake out a claim while the getting was good. Thus, they announced that Smallville producers Kelly Souders and Brian Peterson (who would've served as showrunners) and Supenatural executive producer McG would be involved in The Graysons, a story about Dick's life in Haly's Circus with his parents, the Flying Graysons, prior to their deaths.

The Graysons received a "put pilot" commitment, meaning that The CW ordered a pilot it agreed to air as either a special or a series. If it didn't air, the network would have to pay substantial fees to the production studios. In short, the The Graysons seemed to be a sure thing. However, a month after the announcement, Warner Bros. pulled the plug, saying it didn't fit its then-current plans for the Batman franchise.

Meanwhile, Smallville producers had planned to incorporate Batman into their storyline, but were shot down by Warner Bros. executives. Producers then cast Justin Hartley as Green Arrow, and life went on with the emerald-hued stand-in hero (although Batman eventually showed up in the Smallville continuation comics).

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The most concrete Batman prequel project we've ever seen is, of course, Gotham. Premiering in 2012 on Fox with a then-unprecedented exclusivity streaming deal with Netflix, Gotham began with Jim Gordon and Bruce Wayne each attempting to solve the elder Waynes' murders, but getting sidetracked by enemies like the Balloon Man, Penguin and Fish Mooney's soap opera, and larger plots like Indian Hill. It's a show that started relatively grounded, but swiftly became, gloriously silly, and is all the better for it.

With Gotham coming to an end, a new Alfred show on the horizon, and all this history of Batman prequels behind them, the question is, again: Why? Why continue to flash back to a time when the World's Greatest Detective was nowhere close to being that?

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Well, half of it is just Warner Bros. doubling down on its golden goose. If people like Batman, executives figure, they want to see everything he was before Batman, right? If they get invested in his build up, we can keep them watching for as long as we want! Love it or hate it, Smallville's decade on the air set the precedent for this sort of thinking.

Alfred Pennyworth

And the other half is genuine interest. One of the tenets of Batman's origin is that he globe-hopped and studied all kinds of  crimefighting skills from all over the world for years. We've seen stories where Batman's past comes back to haunt him, like "Hush" or the "Night of the Ninja" episode of Batman the Animated Series. We've seen stories about Batman's family legacy being questioned or redefined, like the whole business with Dr. Simon Hurt possibly being Thomas Wayne from the Grant Morrison Batman era.

And there's also the question of how to fit comic characters into standard TV formulas. The recently cancelled Lucifer, for instance, took the high concept of "devil leaves hell and goes to LA" from the original Vertigo comic and molded it into probably the oldest genre of American serial broadcast fiction: The cop show. Given that Pennyworth starts out with him in the British Secret Service, it's likely this is going to be an action show like Strike Back, or a spy show in the vein of Killing Eve or The Night Manager. That's not a bad hook for a TV show, and tying it to a guy we all know and love is, really, a pretty savvy move.

KEEP READING: Killing Joke: Gotham Adapted the Classic Batman Story – But Did It Work?