Should Superhero TV Shows Get Away With Bad Writing?

The ever-growing saturation of comic books in pop culture hasn’t stopped at just film, with good ol’ television making sure they get a nice little slice of the pie – with some varying results. For every Flash we get a very forced Gotham, and for every Arrow, we get a bang average Constantine. However, even the best of the superhero TV genre fall down at the simplest hurdles of storytelling and they seem to be getting away with it.

Arrow, a programme that I have dearly loved since it first aired, is one of the biggest offenders. Sure, it has some of the best fighting choreography on television but I sometimes feel like I’m watching an episode of 90210 – with every single character being ridiculously attractive, acting up just because the plot demands it, rather than it being a natural step for their character to take. Arrow works very hard to convey the grittiness of Sterling City and that illusion is broken when the city is populated by an extremely high ratio of out of work models.

The writers have definitely struggled with characters such as Thea and Laurel, sometimes just having them storm out of the room because we hadn’t seen someone get punched on the face for five minutes and they’re worried we might not be paying attention. They can’t just be angry for angry sakes, we need to believe their anger comes from a real place within a real character otherwise audiences aren’t going to buy into the conflict at all.

Most of the characters on the show feel very one dimensional with just a few character traits – which usually comes in the form of some sort of anger or rage or annoyance that is usually misplaced or unfounded. Aside from Slade Wilson and Malcolm Merlyn, the villains on Arrow suffer from this problem the most with the show more than happy to just brand them as “The Bad Guys” rather than flesh out their complexities and motivations.

These problems alone would be enough to put me off most other television programmes but the hold that comic books have over me is too strong. I love Green Arrow as a character and I’m willing to put up with a few bum characters so I can experience his live action journey into an ever-growing DC TV Universe  - the same goes for Flash. Not so much for Gotham.

However, I do feel that a greater level of writing is needed. We need a superhero TV Show that stands up on its own to be counted amongst the big boys of Breaking Bad and House of Cards! No longer will we say “Well, it’s really good for a comic book show” We will just bleat on about how fucking good it is to everyone, regardless of whether they have a soft spot for the odd masked vigilant.

At the end of the day, aren’t we all just killing time until the next season of Game of Thrones?