Gotham: 15 Reasons It Is Not Lasting Another Season - CBR

Fans of Gotham breathed a sigh of relief that the Fox network didn't cancel it. Instead, TV's Jim Gordon and Bruce Wayne will get to fight the good fight for one more season. The network made the announcement on May 8 during the annual Upfront Week presentations, which is when the network parades its stars and producers before Madison Avenue ad executives to entice them to buy commercials. The good news for Gotham is tempered, though: the next season order is for only 13 episodes, not 22, and after that, Gotham will come to an end.

Why couldn't Gotham go on longer? It's based on the origin of one of the most popular characters of all time. Since 1940, Batman has conquered all media -- comic books, serials, animated television, live-action TV, movies, video games and even Lego toys. But Gotham has struggled to find its footing, and was buffeted by the competition. Many factors, though, go into the effort to mount a TV series, and all parties want to see it succeed -- and to last -- so decisions to bring any given show to an end aren't easy or made lightly. Here, CBR looks at the reasons why Gotham got one more season, and no more.

15 IT'S NOT SMALLVILLE

The successful model for the long-running origin-that's-not-an-origin series is Smallville. It debuted in 2001 on the WB network, survived the 2006 merger of WB and UPN that spawned the CW, and continued on as a mainstay of the CW lineup to 2011. Smallville, starring Tom Welling, focused on young Clark Kent's life before he adopted the mantle of Superman. Ironically, Smallville was developed after a proposal for Bruce Wayne, a TV show about the title character's teenage years, fell through the cracks in 1999. At the time, Warner's TV division was interested in the show, but the movie division had plans to recover from the 1997 flop Batman and Robin. Under consideration were adaptations of The Dark Knight Returns and "Batman: Year One."

Smallville lasted for 10 seasons, with producers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar invoking a "no tights, no fights" rule, keeping Kent from appearing in costume until the series finale. Although Gotham had a similar notion of exploring Bruce Wayne's past, it just couldn't hold off on the moment when Wayne becomes Batman and keep the viewers interested for nearly as long. The show plans to move toward Wayne fully taking up the mantle of the bat during the fifth season.

14 TOO HARD TO JUMP IN

Despite being based on the same idea -- Bruce Wayne's early, pre-Batman years -- 2014's Gotham is not the show 1999's Bruce Wayne might have been. Gotham begins with Thomas and Martha Wayne being murdered, and a rookie detective being assigned to the case: James Gordon, who has been away from town after years in the military. Initially, Gotham was more of Gordon's origin story, as he delved into the Wayne murders and found the Gotham Police Department to be incompetent and corrupt, and struggled to navigate an environment where warring factions of mobsters hold sway over the city.

Gotham also introduced the origins of several Batman rogues like The Penguin, The Riddler, The Scarecrow and Solomon Grundy, and created new crooks unique to the series like Fish Mooney and Professor Pyg. It moved away from being a police procedural in superhero drag, where Gordon and his few allies try to take down the establishment and he does more and more dirty deeds in the name of cleaning things up. Mining the comics lore willy-nilly, Gotham brought in the Court of Owls, and loosely adapted The Long Halloween maxiseries and The Killing Joke. It has developed its own continuity, making it hard to reconcile this version of Batman with any other -- and thus makes it hard for new viewers to find a jumping-on point.

13 NO CROSSOVER POTENTIAL

At the CW network's 2018 Upfront presentation to advertisers in May, Arrow star Stephen Amell announced the next Arrowverse crossover will come in December and will feature Batwoman. Not only that, CW President and CEO Mark Pedowitz said, "We are adding the city of Gotham into the Arrowverse." Putting Batwoman in the next Arrowverse crossover comes too late to help Gotham, which could have used the boost in viewership that these events bring. Arrow and Supergirl have thrown out hints that there is a Gotham on their respective worlds. Plus, Oliver Queen once publicly name-checked Bruce Wayne and as Green Arrow has had his hands full over the years facing off against Batman villains such as Ra's al-Ghul. But Gotham being on Fox, is isolated from the Arrowverse.

And without a link to those shows, Gotham has missed out on opportunities to grow its audience, because the three Arrowverse crossovers have been big hits for the CW. The first crossover of Arrow and The Flash was in 2014; the second in 2015 introduced the Legends of Tomorrow and spun the team off into its own series. The "Invasion" from 2016, and 2017's "Crisis On Earth-X," involved the three shows and Supergirl, which moved to the CW network from CBS in its second season. "Invasion" gave the CW its highest-rated week in six years.

12 THE BIG SCREEN ALWAYS COMES FIRST

Warner Bros. Television has a mostly successful slate of shows on the air based on DC Comics and Vertigo properties -- Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, Black Lightning and I-Zombie. Exceptions are Lucifer, which bit the dust this season, and Constantine, which had a single season on NBC in 2014-15. But even with those hits, as well as the long-running Smallville, Warner has always seemed to emphasize its movie slate of superheroes over its TV offerings. Smallville got on the air in 2001 after multiple failed attempts to reboot the Superman movie franchise after the 1987 flop Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Smallville also introduced a prototype Justice League, but efforts to do more with Smallville's versions of the Flash, Green Arrow, Aquaman and Cyborg never went anywhere.

More recently, Arrow introduced Amanda Waller, but killed off the character ahead of her appearance in the Suicide Squad movie, played by Oscar winner Viola Davis. And there was controversy that TV's Flash, Grant Gustin, had no shot at playing the character on the big screen in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice or Justice League. The pending end of Gotham clears the slate as Warner's tries to get the Batman movie franchise back on track, after Justice League underperformed at the box office. And Gotham has introduced a character who is The Joker in all but name -- but that name can't be used on the TV show because of plans for him in the movies.

11 THE MOUSE AND THE PEACOCK WANT THE FOX

In December 2017, the Walt Disney Company announced it intended to buy 21st Century Fox, paying $52.4 billion in stock. The deal calls for Disney to get Fox Entertainment Group, which includes 2oth Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures, Fox Sports Networks and other production studios; Fox's 30 percent stake in Hulu; the FX Networks; a 73 percent stake in National Geographic Partners; and other assets. The Fox Broadcasting Company, Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, MyNetworkTV, Fox's sports channels and its 28 TV stations will spin off into an entity informally called "New Fox."

Big as this deal is, Comcast/Universal announced on May 23 that it plans to top Disney with an all-cash bid “at least as favorable to Fox shareholders as the Disney offer.” Comcast didn’t give a final number, but it likely would be enough to cover the $1.52 billion breakup fee Fox would have to pay if it rejected Disney. Comcast already made an offer for another Fox subsidiary, satellite broadcaster Sky. Even though it can take 12 to 18 months for this deal to wend its way through the regulatory process, Fox Broadcasting is already reshaping its future. What this means is Fox will de-emphasize scripted programming, double down on news, sports and reality programs, and give even more of a priority to having its own shows on its own air. It's a new environment that leaves less room for a show like Gotham, which isn't made in-house.

10 A GUEST AT MARVEL?

The Walt Disney Company bought Marvel Entertainment in 2009 for $4 billion. The benefit of that deal was to provide source material both for its film studios and its television networks. The strategy has been a success; Marvel's movies are the gold standard for superhero films, which generally are popular, mostly are positively reviewed, and lucrative. And most of Marvel's superhero TV shows, whether on broadcast channels like ABC or streaming services like Netflix are linked to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

On the other hand, Warner's superhero TV shows don't have a similar reach. Most are on the CW, which is a joint venture of Warner Bros. Entertainment and CBS. But the CW pulls in an average of only 1.89 million viewers for all of its programs, fifth behind CBS (9.7 million), NBC (8.2 million), ABC (6.2 million) and Fox (6.0 million), according to The Wrap. Placing Gotham on Fox automatically gave it a better shot at a bigger audience than the CW can offer. But with the Fox network retooling to focus on reality shows and sports in the wake of the Disney deal, how much support can DC shows get there? Danette Chavez, the AV Club's TV editor, tweeted "#Lucifer and #Gotham fans: no word yet on renewals, but Fox CEO says there's no plan to cut ties with DC shows just because of the network's new Marvel connections. #TCA18" -- but Lucifer still got canceled.

9 NO THURSDAY NIGHT HOME

For its first three seasons, Fox carried Gotham on Monday nights. For Season 4, it was switched to Thursdays. But Thursdays are off the table for Gotham or any scripted programming on Fox for a huge chunk of the year. In January, the network reached a deal with the NFL to carry Thursday Night Football, which moves from NBC and CBS. Fox will devote 30 more hours on its slate to football, carrying 11 games on Thursdays on its broadcast network beginning with the fourth week of each season. excluding Thanksgiving. It will also produce seven more games for the NFL Network, and add to its coverage of the NFL draft and other game-related events.

Fox Sports will pay $3.3 billion over five years or about $650 million annually. That is $200 million more each year than NBC Sports and CBS Sports, which shared the package, paid the previous year. Even though football is slumping -- NBC and CBS are losing money on their football package -- Fox paid big for the NFL package because it needed a proven ratings-getter after it will shed 21st Century Fox and shift its overall focus to sports and reality programming. Plus, from the beginning, Fox has a lower footprint on the air and fewer time slots each week because its prime-time schedule ends at 10 p.m., whereas rivals ABC, CBS and NBC program up to 11 p.m.

8 NOT A FOX SHOW

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Gotham is produced by Warner Bros. Television, not Fox. This made it less valuable and more expendable to the network than many of its other programs. Since the rules that forbade TV networks from producing and owning shows were undone in 1993, networks have tended to favor shows that are produced by another part of the corporate family over shows produced elsewhere. That's because if a show is a hit when it reaches syndication or goes to a streaming service, the company would rather not see the windfall go to some other outfit. If a show is a really big hit -- like, say, Seinfeld -- it could even cover the costs from the shows that didn't make it to 100 episodes and weren't syndicated.

Accordingly, six of the nine dramas on the 2017-18 Fox lineup -- 9-1-1, Empire, The Exorcist, The Resident, Star, The X-Files -- are produced by 20th Century Fox Television. Two, Gotham and Lethal Weapon, are produced by Warner Bros., and the third, The Gifted, is a joint venture of Fox and Marvel Television. It's hard enough for any show with slipping numbers to justify its continued presence on the lineup, but all things being equal, the edge often goes to the show where the network at least has a stake in it, if it doesn't own it outright. Gotham doesn't have that edge with Fox.

7 LETHAL WEAPON

Going into the 2018 Upfronts on May 8 -- the annual ritual in which the networks present their slate of shows to advertisers -- things looked iffy for Gotham and for Lethal Weapon, its sister show from Warner Bros. Television. Both were on the bubble, with frantic deal-making behind the scenes to keep them afloat. Lethal Weapon, in its second season, is a newer show and gets better ratings than Gotham, averaging 4.113 million viewers and an average 0.99 rating in the 18-49 demo. The issue with Lethal Weapon was co-star Clayne Crawford, whose on-set conduct caused him to be reprimanded more than once and blamed for "emotional abuse and creating a hostile environment," according to Deadline Hollywood Daily.

Crawford's behavior put the show's renewal in jeopardy, until the network and producers explored firing him and recasting the role. In the days before the upfronts, Crawford did get the boot, but it took a while to find his replacement. This went on as the deal was being worked to give Gotham one more season. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Fox prepared to renew Gotham and cancel Lethal Weapon if it couldn't line up another actor for by the upfronts. But Gotham got its 13-episode deal, and at the 11th hour, Lethal Weapon signed Seann William Scott to play a new character.

6 NO MAN'S LAND

Gotham's fourth season ended with the city isolated from the rest of the world. This sets up a different status quo for Season 5, following the blueprint left by "No Man's Land." That storyline was a sequel to "Cataclysm," in which Gotham City was hit with a massive 7.6 earthquake. After that and the outbreaks of infectious disease Gotham suffered in the 1996 "Contagion" and "Legacy" crossovers, the federal government refuses to rebuild the city. It declares Gotham no longer part of the United States, puts a fence around it and blows up the bridges and tunnels to keep people out. "No Man's Land" watches the people who didn't follow orders to leave: rival criminal gangs engaging in turf battles, and a ragtag group of Gotham Police officers trying to keep order, with the help of Batman and his team.

"No Man's Land" wound through the Batman titles and various spinoffs in 1999, including Batman: Harley Quinn, which created the DC Universe version of the animated character. Gotham executive producer Danny Cannon told Comicbook.com that the story was a good way to upend viewer expectations. "Our characters have reached a maturity now; our characters are so well-defined, and that's why I think as writers, that's right about the point when you want to change people's perception of them. The [term] 'reboot' means, just when you thought you knew people, something else will happen, and just when you thought your Season 5 would be like Season 4, Season 5 is completely different."