Fox took a gamble in 2013 on a show with no Batman in it. Bruno Heller was hired to write and executive produce a prequel built around James Gordon, and the network ordered 16 episodes in March 2014 before bumping the count to 22. Gotham premiered on September 22, 2014, and ran for five seasons and 100 episodes, ending on April 25, 2019.
It is a bigger, stranger, more uneven show than that logline suggests. It is also, at its best, the most interesting thing Fox put on the air in that decade.
Trailer, via FOX.
A Rookie Detective and a 12-Year-Old Boy
The premise is narrow on purpose. Gordon starts as a detective at the Gotham City Police Department, partnered with Harvey Bullock, and the first case the show hands them is the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents. Bruce is 12 years old.
That is the whole engine. Everything else — the gang war between Carmine Falcone, Sal Maroni and Fish Mooney, the rise of a low-level thug named Oswald Cobblepot, the slow corruption of Edward Nygma — spins off that one night in an alley.
Ben McKenzie plays Gordon, and he plays him straight. Heller had shot a previous pilot with McKenzie for CBS and wrote the character with him in mind. It shows. McKenzie’s Gordon is the fixed point the rest of the city rotates around.
He’s not an anti-hero, he’s a true hero – but he will have to compromise.
That is McKenzie’s own description of the character, and it is the most useful sentence anyone involved with Gotham has said about it.
The Penguin Steals the Show
Robin Lord Taylor was cast as Oswald Cobblepot in February 2014, and within a season he had taken the series from everyone else.
The show’s smartest move is treating Cobblepot as a striver rather than a freak. He begins as a thug pushed into the middle of a mob war he has no business surviving, and he survives it by being more patient and more vicious than the people above him. Taylor plays the ambition without the camp.
Donal Logue’s Harvey Bullock is the counterweight. Logue was the subject of January 2014 rumors that he would play Gordon; he denied them on Twitter, and was cast as Bullock instead. The character is described as ethically conflicted, which is a polite way of saying he is on the take and knows exactly how much.
The show works when those two share a scene. It works less well when it forgets them.
Bruce Wayne, Grieving and Compulsive
David Mazouz was cast as Bruce Wayne in March 2014, and casting him was, by Heller’s account, the hard part.
“It’s such an important casting and it would’ve been very dangerous to cast the wrong person,” Heller said, adding that the process “took a lot of negotiation, a lot of back and forth so that everyone was happy and comfortable.”
Mazouz’s read on the character is that the grieving was the point. “You never got to explore what Bruce Wayne was going through or his grieving process or what his anger makes him do,” he said. “At this point in his life, he’s angry, he’s scared, he’s compulsive, and he’s lonely.”
That is a real idea, and for two seasons Gotham commits to it. A boy who does not yet know what he is going to become is more interesting than a boy who does.
Hugo Strange, the Court of Owls and the Indian Hill Monsters
Then the show starts throwing things at the wall.
Season two brings Theo Galavan, who wants Bruce dead for the Order of St. Dumas. Gordon gets framed for murder by Nygma. At Arkham Asylum, Professor Hugo Strange runs experiments in a secret facility called Indian Hill and turns inmates into monsters for the Court of Owls.
Season three makes Gordon a bounty hunter chasing those monsters. Jervis Tetch arrives with a deadly virus. Cobblepot and Nygma fight for control of the city. Bruce is told by the Court of Owls’ leader to find Ra’s al Ghul and finish his training.
Season four has Bruce fighting crime as a masked vigilante tentatively called the “Dark Knight,” Sofia Falcone moving in on Cobblepot’s underworld, and Jeremiah Valeska allying with Ra’s al Ghul to turn Gotham into an isolated ruin.
Season five has Nyssa al Ghul seeking vengeance for her father, Eduardo Dorrance commanding the city’s military presence, and Jeremiah scheming to cement his bond with Bruce as hated enemies. Then the finale jumps a decade, with Mikhail Mudrik playing an adult Bruce in the Batman suit.
A Prequel That Outlived Its Own Ending
The fifth season was announced in May 2018 as the last one, cut to 12 episodes. It premiered January 3, 2019, and closed April 25, 2019. Fox did not cancel a hit so much as let a story finish.
The show’s afterlife is more instructive. Pennyworth, a prequel built around Jack Bannon playing a younger version of the Alfred Pennyworth that Sean Pertwee played in Gotham, began airing in July 2019 and ran until October 2022.
Pertwee’s Alfred, for the record, draws on the Earth One version of the character. That is a detail Gotham cared about and most of its audience did not.
Filming took place mostly across New York City, which is why the show looks like a city rather than a backlot, and why its best scenes have weather in them.
What Gotham Gets Right and What It Wastes
The cast is deeper than it needed to be. Zabryna Guevara played Sarah Essen, a captain at the Gotham City Police Department and Gordon’s direct superior, for the first two seasons. Erin Richards played Barbara Kean. Camren Bicondova played Selina Kyle, cast in early March 2014 alongside Mazouz. Cory Michael Smith played Nygma.
That is a lot of talent in service of a show that kept inventing new conspiracies to keep them busy. The Court of Owls, the Order of St. Dumas, Indian Hill, the Tetch virus, the military occupation — Gotham rarely met a plot it was willing to let end.
The result is a series with a genuinely great first season, a strong second, and three more that alternate between thrilling and exhausting. When it slows down and lets Cobblepot scheme or lets Bullock be tired, it is excellent. When it stacks another apocalypse on top of the last one, it becomes noise.
The show also never solved its central structural problem: it is a prequel to a story everyone already knows, so the tension has to come from how, not what. Gotham knows this and still reaches for the what.
The Score
Gotham is worth the commitment, but go in knowing the shape of it. The first two seasons are the ones that justify the premise, and the back half is a long, loud, frequently rewarding mess.
It is a 7.1 out of 10.
Key facts
- Premiered: September 22, 2014, on Fox
- Finale: April 25, 2019
- Seasons: 5
- Episodes: 100
- Season 1 order: 16 episodes, expanded to 22
- Final season: 12 episodes, renewed May 2018
- Metacritic: 71/100
- Score: 7.1/10
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