ARROW: SEASON 1 (2012-13)

 

HENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical, psychological, sociological*

Producer Greg Berlanti’s SMALLVILLE series ended a couple of years before the founding teleseries that led to his “Arrowverse.” But although both shows offered up a heapin’ helpin’ of romantic anxiety and tortuous trust issues, the earlier show’s take on a Young Superman seemed consciously modeled on Joss Whedon’s BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, but without the horror-fantasy’s darker edges. ARROW, debuting years after the phenomenal success of the very dark (and often dire) Bat-flicks of Christopher Nolan, gave viewers an edgier hero capable of killing during his war on cosmopolitan crime.

That hero, known as the Hood for most of the first season, was of course patterned on DC Comics stalwart Green Arrow, and is played with stern aplomb by square-jawed Stephen Amell. In the comics Green Arrow spent most of his existence as a very lightweight superhero, but he entered a “grim and gritty” phase in the eighties and even eschewed his signature use of wild trick-arrows. Though every comics-derived teleseries chooses various dishes from the buffet of established continuity to produce its adaptations, ARROW seems somewhat indebted to the Green Arrow who uses arrows that can kill—and indeed, the Hood does kill a handful of hardened criminals in his first few episodes.

The comics character trained himself in archery while marooned on a desert island. Berlanti’s Oliver Queen follows a similar trajectory, but he starts off as an irresponsible playboy rather than a hero pretending to be one, and the island on which he’s isolated for years is full of almost as many bizarre characters and situations as your average LOST episode. Once Oliver returns to normal society, he’s fired with the will to become a vigilante, but his course is compromised by a retinue of family and close companions never seen in the comics-- mother, sister, stepfather, best friend, former girlfriend and girlfriend’s father. (The last two hate Oliver’s guts because the playboy went on a jaunt with the girlfriend’s sister, who died during said jaunt). On the plus side, the Hood receives support from the two charter members of “Team Arrow,” tough bodyguard John Diggle and IT-girl Felicity Smoak. The vigilante (who will eventually accept the “Green Arrow” moniker) also gets the beginnings of a rogue’s gallery taken from the funnybooks, derived from such characters as Count Vertigo, Deathstroke and Merlyn the Magician.

The first two or three seasons are the best in the series, before the show became impossibly overburdened with a badly conceived ensemble of crimefighters. At this point, the hyperkinetic fight-scenes are still shot well enough that viewers can make out what’s happening, and all the soap operatics are mildly engrossing, though always a little on the superficial side. In an early episode Felicity remarks to Oliver that his family drama is reminiscent of HAMLET, with him returning from far-off parts to find his mother remarried to another man (though this time the father’s demise is laid at the son’s door, and the “Claudius” is actually less of a criminal than the “Gertrude”.) There’s a big criminal scheme that in 2012 might’ve been seen as “the Revenge of the One Percenters,” and indeed Berlanti follows Nolan in avoiding most of the non-wealthy malefactors. But from a contemporary standpoint there’s a more interesting synchronicity that appears in a flashback that takes place on Oliver’s island. When Berlanti’s writers imagined a plot to destroy China’s economy by shooting down an airliner, little did they imagine that eight years later China would unleash its own evil plan, whereby the entire world would suffer economic devastation.