The new fall television season seems ages away, as most shows have just gone on hiatus for the summer, but with Comic-Con approaching details are emerging slowly about the direction in which returning shows will take. Executive producer Marc Guggenheim sat down for an interview with Comic Book Resources and hinted at the future of the hit CW series that adapts the legend of Green Arrow to the small screen. Here are some highlights.
Regarding any reference to Batman, he stated:
“We’re not quite ready to invoke the Batman universe yet, on the show.”
Regarding the Oliver/Laurel relationship, he said:
“I think anytime you do a tv show and you’ve got two people together who are like star-crossed lovers and they’re destined to be together but you don’t want them together because then you run into that Moonlighting problem of your two main characters, once they actually end up together in a committed relationship it seems to lose all its sexual spark. The little magic trick that we have to do with Oliver and Laurel is keep bringing them together then pulling them apart. Bringing them together and pulling them apart… We ended season one with them really in love with each other. And the trick in season two is how do we drive a little bit of a wedge between them, without going back to the beginning of season one where Laurel basically hated Oliver.”
As far as lessons learned from season one, Guggenheim explained:
“The biggest thing we learned was to not try to do too much in any given episode. We want the episodes to be jam packed… but in too many of the early episodes there were a lot of D story lines. Writers always talk in that you do an A storyline, B storyline and C storyline. We had like A, B, C, D and a flashback. And the D stories inevitable felt ghettoized, in sort of their own show… One thing we’ve tried to do in season two is each episode begins with an inciting incident and then branches off into A, B and if necessary C stories.”
How long will the series run? Well, the creators are certainly thinking ahead:
“We were talking about what season two could be even before we got the pick up (for a full first season), and we’ve been talking now about season three. We even have ideas for season four. It’s just sort of in our nature to say, ‘Well if we set this up this in this year, that’ll set up this in the next year.”
And finally, what path is our lead hero on?
“This was always sort of the trajectory we planned. This has always been the first two years of “Batman Begins.” In fact, last year, around October, right before the show premiered, we had a meeting with the head of the studio and we basically said, it’s about going from being the Hood to the Arrow to Green Arrow. We knew all along that it would take us two years to do that. The thing that makes me worried is, the show works well because it has darkness to it. It’s not gonna be all sunshine and rainbows in Season 2, I don’t want people to get the wrong impression that the show is going to abruptly change, tonally. It’s actually consistent in its tone even though Oliver has a more “Aspirational” mission.”
Definitely check out the entire interview for more info, including Guggenheim’s discussion of his upcoming Punisher miniseries from Marvel.
Are you desperately awaiting the return of ‘Arrow?’ What DC characters would you like to see utilized on the show? Are you ready for Oliver to evolve from vigilante to super hero? Leave a comment below!
