Young (Pre
'Gotham' begins with classic Batman visuals: a hooded figure crouches between a pair of gargoyles before jumping off a building. Except that it's not Bruce Wayne, a.k.a. the Batman, who's going off the roof. He's still 8 years old and has yet to beat up his first criminal. At that moment he's leaving a movie theater with his parents.
Judged among this fall's group of new television shows, the pilot for Fox's 'Gotham' (beginning Monday night) stands out for what it has: a distinctive look, a dash of style, a collection of slightly exaggerated but convincing performances. People who come to it because of its Batman connection, though, are likely to focus on what it doesn't have, which is a costumed hero.
If they stick around, they can see whether the series continues to pull off the trick of being credible as both a more or less straight-ahead crime drama (its essential structure) and a glossy comic-book adaptation (its marketing mandate). The show's creator, Bruno Heller, has experience with the nonprocedural procedural - he made 'The Mentalist' for CBS, which has survived into a seventh season by placing less emphasis on detective work than on workplace humor and the winsome charm of its star, Simon Baker. 'Gotham' presents a similar sort of challenge, but its dark, dystopian, highly stylized mode will give it a higher degree of difficulty.
One of the fall's three new comics-inspired series (along with NBC's 'Constantine' and CW's 'Flash'), 'Gotham' is being called a Batman prequel. That's true and not true, as it begins with the same foundational scene that every new Batman narrative - including Tim Burton's 'Batman' and Christopher Nolan's 'Batman Begins' - must include, though usually in flashback.
On their way home from the theater (the opera in the more grandiose 'Batman Begins'), Bruce's parents are gunned down in the street as he watches. In 'Gotham,' the murders are also witnessed by a rooftop prowler, who will turn out to be Selina Kyle, the future Catwoman.
But instead of jumping forward a couple of decades to the grown-up Bruce in cape and mask, the show stays in the present and introduces its actual hero, James Gordon, the younger version of the familiar Commissioner Gordon. Here he's a brash young detective who catches the Wayne case, befriends Bruce and his stoic butler, Alfred, and gets a quick education in Gotham City's moral rot.
Much of the fun of 'Gotham,' at least initially, lies in seeing which Batman characters Mr. Heller and his staff have chosen to incorporate and how they've tweaked them. In addition to Gordon, there's the brutal cop Harvey Bullock, here cast as Gordon's partner, and a roster of proto-villains or adversaries: Kyle, a very young Ivy Pepper (presumably the future Poison Ivy), a police forensics technician named Edward Nygma (the future Riddler) and the apprentice gangster Oswald Cobblepot, who hates his nickname, Penguin.
As Gordon, Ben McKenzie is solid in a more theatrical version of the upright-cop role he played in 'Southland.' Donal Logue is reliably blustery and sarcastic as Bullock. The biggest impressions are made by the villains, whose smaller roles are looser and more fun: Robin Lord Taylor as Cobblepot, Cory Michael Smith as Nygma and Jada Pinkett Smith as a new character, a chartreuse-haired gang boss with the distracting name Fish Mooney.
The real star of the 'Gotham' pilot is its consistent style, a combination of production design, cinematography and writing that manages to evoke both the bang-pow 1940s spirit of the original 'Batman' and post-'Blade Runner' neo-noir. If you're going to make yet another show or movie about an honest cop in a corrupt city, you'd better make it look good, and this Gotham City, with its nightmarish gothic skyline under perpetually gray skies, looks pretty good.
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