Gotham Review

It begins as a corrupt cop show and cannot sustain the pretence, because the premise is fundamentally broken: a series about the years before Batman must keep its main event permanently offscreen while introducing every villain who is supposed to arrive after him. Rather than fix that, the show simply escalates, and the escalation is where the fun is. Robin Lord Taylor's Penguin, a scheming little snob climbing over corpses, is a genuinely great performance sustained across five seasons, and Cameron Monaghan's twin proto Jokers commit so completely to derangement that the series works best as horror.

The production design is handsome and deliberately timeless, all neon and rain and brutalist concrete. The costs are obvious. Ben McKenzie's Gordon is the least interesting person in his own show, the plotting lurches between mob war, virus outbreak and city wide siege with no through line, and Bruce Wayne spends five seasons in a holding pattern. The final episode, jumping ten years forward to deliver a cowl at last, is unintentionally funny.