Ranking Every Superhero TV Show From Worst To Best
Marvel and DC are a lot closer on the small screen than they are the big, but who's the winner?
Superhero TV has made some major leaps in recent years.
Looking back over the last couple of decades, the standout is probably Smallville, which managed to run for an impressive 10 seasons. Even that, though, suffered a steady (and then sharp) decline in ratings, and it didn't make that much of a lasting impact.
Beyond that, you have one-season wonders (as in, I *wonder* how they even got made) such as Blade: The Series, and failed pilots like Wonder Woman. Heck, the 1990 version of The Flash is held up as a decent offering from the genre, which shows just how far it's come.
In the past few years, superhero TV has started to catch up with both the rest of television and its big screen counterparts.
Starting with Arrow back in 2012, through to the creation of the Netflix Marvel Universe, these series are delivering great action, fun characters, and some wonderful comic book moments, while also having larger issues to deal with and perhaps even reaching the heights of prestige TV.
Of course, not all heroes are created equal, and not all superhero TV shows are the same. Among all our television saviours, there are the shows we don't need, and the ones we really didn't deserve.
9. Gotham
Taking a leaf out of the Smallville playbook, Gotham promised to give us a Batman series without Batman. Instead, the focus would be on Jim Gordon, while it would slowly start to sow the seeds for the transformation of young Bruce Wayne into Bats.
The end product was part comic book show, part crime procedural, and while it may not have had Batman, it's certainly been batsh*t crazy.
It's an element it's increasingly leaned into, which it deserves some credit for I guess, and it has made a couple of excellent casting choices: Donal Logue is wonderfully gruff as Harvey Bullock, and Robin Lord Taylor an inspired take on the Penguin.
However, the craziness can't compensate for the show's numerous flaws. The lead character is perhaps the most dull on the show, and also pretty unlikable, the plots boring, there's an insane number of villains, and the dialogue is awfully written. Sure, the show has its fans, partly in a 'so bad it's good' kinda way, but mostly it's just bad.