Gotham earned a bit of flack during its first season for featuring too many one-off villains and not enough of a long-term story arc. Still, the show did well enough in the ratings and intrigued enough fans to earn a second season on Fox. And moving into round two, executive producer Danny Cannon recently spoke out to say that Gotham is kicking the storytelling up a notch. Here’s what the show has planned for Season 2:
Our ambitions are higher. We’ve created a saga in Season 2 and are splitting the saga into two pieces. Rather than telling so many different stories and treating them as individual stories, it’s 22 episodes of one story. Therefore, it’s a lot harder to break because we want to organically weave in a lot of origin stories into this one main story. It’s very complex.
So, it looks as if the one-off episodes are giving way to something more complex, which should be good news, provided the season-long arc is compelling. To delve a little more deeply into what that will entail, Cannon also told Collider that the goals in Season 2 have changed to reflect the changing attitude of the drama.
It was very much in our mind that, if someone like Batman is going to be necessary, the rise of the villains is about creating an environment where Gordon has to lose control. What’s unleashed upon Gotham is a villain who is only trying to outshine, outplay and out-maneuver another villain, and not the police. There’s a competition amongst villains, and a lack of honor. A type of villain that believes in chaos and anarchy and doesn’t have the same morality as any of us… So, Gordon has to embrace his darker side, in order to face that.
During the first season of Gotham, there were various villains—especially in the form of mob bosses—attempting to out-maneuver and manipulate one another. This sounds like an extension of the same sort of idea, but with wilder, crazier villains and less one-off criminals.
It was just a few days ago that series lead Ben McKenzie spoke out about the fact that Gotham’s first season wasn’t as solid as it could have been. At the time, the actor said that it was a mistake to introduce a villain and catch them within the frame of one episode as if it were a procedural. A portion of his blunt words included this heavy critique:
That was just a mistake. We should’ve never done it.
Over the last few months, it has seemed as if Gotham has added on a whole slew of villains, and it’s interesting to note that they might all interact within this larger arc in some way. Currently, no one’s really talking in-depth about the big plot in the new season, but color us intrigued.
You can catch new episodes of Gotham starting on Monday, September 21 at 8 p.m. ET. For the rest of the fall TV premiere dates, head href.
