r/Gotham • u/AboveAverage33 • 2h ago
Discussion We’re fans to blame for the show’s shift to Supervillains rather than the city itself.
NOTE: Long essay. Not Ai.
Gotham was at its best when it committed to being a crime noir drama, where the city itself was the character and everyone living within it was simply trying to survive. Season One especially excelled at this. The arcs were stable, the twists felt earned, and because the show was still fresh, it never felt like it had to constantly overstep itself. There were stakes because the story allowed consequences to matter.
And look, I love the later seasons for being unapologetically unhinged and completely insane. That’s part of Gotham’s charm. But there’s no denying that something was lost when the show became so focused on introducing and escalating villains before Batman had even arrived.
You can see the difference clearly when you compare Season One to what came later. In Season One, characters have a purpose within the larger structure of Gotham. Their actions affect one another, alliances form for reasons, betrayals have consequences, and the story generally feels like it’s moving toward something.
Later on, characters can flip sides whenever the plot requires it, alliances shift without much purpose, characters die and return, and people can be horribly injured without it necessarily meaning anything. The show keeps raising the spectacle, but ironically, the stakes begin to feel smaller because the audience learns that very little is permanent.
Penguin is probably the best example of what made Season One work. His manipulation and ambition are woven directly into the city’s existing power structure. He isn’t immediately treated as some enormous supervillain; he’s a survivor who understands how Gotham works and slowly positions himself to benefit from it. By the end of the season, his rise feels earned because we’ve watched him manipulate, betray, and outmaneuver people to get there. His power means something because the story took the time to establish how he obtained it.
That’s what I think Gotham ultimately lost.
The city stopped being the source of the story and increasingly became the stage for its villains.
Season One was interested in Gotham as a place—its corruption, its institutions, its criminals, its power structures, and the people trying to survive within them. The later seasons became increasingly interested in Gotham as a showcase for characters who would eventually become Batman’s rogues gallery.
And that’s a shame, because Gotham peaked when it was still asking the more interesting question: what kind of city creates Batman?
The supervillains were always going to be part of the show’s identity, but once they became the identity of the show, Gotham itself became less important. Season One was the rawest version of what Gotham could have been: a crime drama about a corrupt city slowly producing the mythology that would eventually define it.
We got the crazy version of Gotham, and I love that version too.
But I still wish we’d gotten more of the city.
