The Four Color Media Monitor

The new TV series planned for the CW network based on Green Arrow (which'll only be titled "Arrow", probably because they're too embarrassed that it's comic-based), reeks of too much interest in targeting the rich, even as it seemingly tries to appease conservatives (H/T: Big Hollywood):

The move to the broader audience won't be the end of Oliver Queen's progressive, populist approach to vigilantism, the creators of the series told a Television Critics Association panel.

"Since the people that Oliver is targeting are the wealthy and the corrupt, there are some echoes of the One Percenters and Occupy Wall Street within the show," said executive producer Andrew Kreisberg.

The series stars Stephen Amell as the bow-wielding hero, who's more Batman than Robin Hood, steal-from-the-rich tendencies aside. Like Batman, Arrow is a One Percenter himself who has no superpowers, but a vast fortune that allows him to create an array of advanced weapons.

Despite lefty leanings, he'll take what Kreisberg calls a "conservative" approach to justice: He's a tough-on-crime hero who sometimes doles out some capital punishment on the spot.

"One of the things you'll see in the early episodes is Arrow always gives the bad guy of the week the opportunity to do the right thing," said Kreisberg. "When he kills he'll kill for necessity, for a reason. It's not random violence."

That's still no excuse for sugarcoating OWS. Now, it's true that during the late 80s, Ollie Queen did kill some thugs, most definitely in outrage when he caught one torturing the Black Canary in GA: The Longbow Hunters, which led into the 1988-98 ongoing series where he did take up a quasi-rightist approach to crimefighting during its first half (which is pretty amazing given that writer Mike Grell is fairly leftist). But he wasn't limited to just targeting the rich; even before that, there were enough times when he faced small-time criminals just as much as wealthier ones. I think it was after Grell left and GA was fitted back more into the DCU again that they really started going out of hand, attacking the 2nd amendment when Kevin Dooley was an editor for the company.

Historically speaking, beginning in 1969, GA had lost a lot of his fortune after a crooked businessman named John Deleon cheated him out of his positions at the company he ran by forging documents framing him for misusing municipal bonds. It wasn't until the turn of the century, after Ollie was resurrected from presumed death, that he regained some of the fortune he'd lost, so it's kinda funny how they're going by the premise that he's wealthy yet still maintaining him as a leftist.

And if they think emphasizing that Ollie will kill criminal vermin in this new TV show is going to impress conservatives, I'm afraid it'll take much more than that to do so. Besides, depending on the situation, it's not like every conservative is begging for the heroes to kill-kill-kill the perps if there's little more to the story structure besides that. The concept of having him kill alone doesn't make it worthy of watching, and there are conservative-like heroes who try to refrain from killing too: besides Batman, there's even Iron Man.

I discovered that this isn't the first time Kreisberg's been associated with Green Arrow: he wrote several issues of the limp Green Arrow/Black Canary series a few years ago, and even Batman Confidential, which leads me to wonder if another mistake here is that they're hiring an "insider" to develop the series instead of someone with a tested record of talent. I don't expect this series to last long, not even to see if Dinah Lance becomes Black Canary.

Labels: dc comics, dreadful writers, msm propaganda, politics