10 Radical Ideas To Save Arrow

In the first season, before the storytelling began to take on a life of its own, the action was the unique selling point of the show. Remember, this was pre-Daredevil: very rarely had anything like Arrow’s fight scenes been seen on US television before. Here, have a reminder:

Anyone who's watched through to the present day knows that these days those fight scenes are, if not quite a thing of the past, then a rare occurrence. Nowadays the fights are like something out of Buffy: all dodgy wirework, generic combinations and fast cuts to disguise slow, lazy form.

I’m no expert on the technical challenges of blocking, shooting and editing an on-screen scrap - everything I know, I learned from watching Jackie Chan films. But as far as basic storytelling goes, this is a standard that works across the board, from superheroes to pro wrestling to football to chess: no one looks good beating a schmuck.

Season four has cast Oliver Queen and Team Arrow as the schmucks, with bog-standard sociopaths going toe to toe with them: the Demolition Team, crooked cops, Anarky, Cupid, to name but a few. Worse, sometimes one of these third-rate losers has taken on two of Team Arrow at once and held his/her own, or even got the upper hand.

While it’s understandable to want the villain of the week to seem like a decent threat, these guys don’t look like badasses by landing a few on the heroes. Instead, the heroes just look like they've lost their mojo.

More creativity and effort urgently needs to be put back into the fight choreography. If the problem is money, then more needs to be allocated to the action. If your villain of the week is a putz, don't shore up their weaknesses by making the heroes look like schmucks.