What it's about: Everyone knows the score by now, right? The origin story of Batman is generally known, with Bruce Wayne witnessing his billionaire parents get gunned down before his eyes during a botched mugging, sparking mental trauma that leads to him dressing in a rubber costume, kidnapping orphans and forcing them to fight crimes with him. All of that tends to be skipped over pretty quickly, though, cos people wanna get to the superhero stuff - who wants to see a rich kid crying? Well, we kinda do. Gotham takes place in the years before Batman was Batman, a police drama taking place in a comic book world and focussing on James Gordon before he was a Commissioner, taking down the likes of Edward Nygma before he was The Riddler. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d1zpt6k5OI Why it looks good: There's been mixed feelings about Gotham in the run up to its première, with many anxious about the possibility of the show getting bogged down in in-jokes and sly nods to the comic books, rather than actually writing good stories. The OC's Ben Schwartz as Gordon and Donal Logue as his mentor, gruff detective Henry Bullock, is reassuring us, as are the creator's insistence that the show is definitely all about telling larger-than-life crime stories in a comic book-y environment. Which sounds like a lot of fun, another cool twist on the standard CSI, Law And Order police procedural, and we are actually pretty jazzed to see the early days of Catwoman, Poison Ivy and The Penguin. Oh and Sean Pertwee as a gruff, cockney former SAS Alfred sounds amazing.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
