Gotham Knights Review: A Soapy, Unfocused Addition to the CW’s Arrowverse

With its heart caught between a daytime soap and a gritty superhero drama, the series never feels as potent or as focused as it could.

Gotham Knights
Photo: The CW

The CW’s Gotham Knights retains the tough-to-stomach sappiness of the network’s other Arrowverse offerings, undercutting the undeniable chemistry between its young leads and cheapening the story’s otherwise solid emotional beats. On paper at least, the show’s plot is quite compelling: When Bruce Wayne (David Miller) is murdered, it falls on his adopted son, Turner Hayes (Oscar Morgan), and a motley crew of young criminals to restore order to Gotham City as District Attorney Harvey Dent (Misha Collins) guns for mayor while the Court of Owls, ever the ubiquitous scoundrels, runs the city from the shadows.

But despite one hell of a hook, the six episodes of Gotham Knights made available to critics feel busy and uneven. Too much happens too early, and the trajectory and motivations of characters like Dent become muddled. Will he remain a justice-dealing D.A. or is he going the way of his comic book counterpart and descending into madness? By the end of these first several episodes, both scenarios are teased but his fate remains frustratingly opaque.

Gotham Knights does pepper its proceedings with some intrigue—the duplicity of Turner’s butler being one of the more promising developments—but it doesn’t carve out a unique spot for itself among the CW’s other superhero fare. It mimics the soap-operatic aspects of Arrow and The Flash without any kind of intention or self-awareness. The story often grinds to a halt so that characters can cloyingly wax poetic about how much they mean to each other.

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Most of the characters are quickly reduced to hollow archetypes, dispensing clunky platitudes masquerading as heartfelt insights. Turner, for instance, hits us with the thoughtful nugget “It’s only when you’re forced to take off the mask that you discover who you really are” in the pilot’s first three minutes, and he doesn’t get much more insightful from there.

The twists, like the reveal about the butler’s potential double-dealing, also come fast. And by the fourth episode, “Of Butchers and Betrayals,” we’re hit with not one but two game-changing twists in quick succession. Teasing out these revelations might have lent the series more palpable tension. As it stands, these plot points merely highlight just how often the series chooses to pummel the viewer with dramatic disclosures rather than let the suspense simmer.

The CW’s most memorable offerings—namely Stargirl and Superman and Lois—have found clever ways to spice up, then unceremoniously break, the superhero franchise mold. Gotham Knights, though, is simply more of the same. With its heart caught between a daytime soap and a gritty superhero drama, it never feels as potent or as focused as its premise promises.

Score: 
 Cast: Oscar Morgan, Misha Collins, Navia Robinson, Olivia Rose Keegan, Tyler DiChiara, Fallon Smythe, Anna Lore, Rahart Adams, David Miller, Ethan Embry  Network: The CW

Hayden Mears

Hayden Mears is a freelance entertainment journalist with work featured in Starburst Magazine, TVLine, The Playlist, CinemaBlend, and others. When he's not waxing poetic about Pixar, Venture Bros., or comic books, he enjoys people, fitness boxing, and writing bios in the third person.

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