So is Arrow season 6 any good?

While normally I would be excited to see more of matt Ryan's Constantine, I am dismayed that it is on Legends of Tomorrow. You could not get me to watch that show if you paid me.

I have mixed feelings about that, because on the one hand I don't disagree; Batman had been DC' golden boy to the exclusion of anyone else, save Superman, and even Superman has had a harder time getting stuff off the ground, ironically, than Batman has.

But on the other hand, so much of what has been done that has been Batman related has largely failed to truly plumb the proper depths of the character and done him real justice. He keeps getting boiled down to such superficial characterization, with little nuance and often missing out a lot of what actually makes him such a great character in the first place. I mean, when was the last time he was truly shown to be the world's greatest detective in a live action adaptation? In the movies he's always just this angry, two-dimensional thug who is scarcely any better than the villains he goes after. There's no mystery or legend about him, he's as overt about his presence as it gets, driving around in a fucking tank and doing as little as possible to hide his identity.

And when it comes to television, they seem to be allergic to the idea of Batman. I'm ambivalent about the idea of a Batwoman or Red Hood or Birds of Prey tv shows, not because I don't think those characters deserve it, but because the catalyst for those characters and their stories, the person who originated their many of their masked personas and the nature of their family has been largely absent from thorough exploration in live action television since the 60s.

As saturated as Batman has been in the movies and admittedly in animation, there's been almost nothing with him as a flesh and blood person on tv outside of Gotham. With Superman there was Superboy, Lois and Clark, Smallville, now some minor presence on Supergirl. With Batman you get a vague reference in the pilot of Lois and Clark, a similar reference at the end of Smallville, more ambiguity on Supergirl, referring to Kara's cousin's scary partner. When they created the last Birds of Prey series, they showed the faintest glimpse of Batman, only to build the show on the premise that he had basically run away and abandoned Gotham. And now there's Gotham, a show which initially, if memory serves, claimed to want to shy away focusing too much on Bruce or even to any great extent on having the full iterations of the villains exist before Bruce could become Batman; hence the reason Ivy was originally shown or at least suggested to still be a young girl when the show first started. That soon gave way to indulging in the development of many of the villains and even Bruce's training without so much as him leaving Gotham to my knowledge. And he is still effectively played by a kid, and admitted by some that to believably make him Batman before the series ends they might do well to recast him. So even now, when we do get Batman on tv, it can scarcely be said that it's even Batman; and as ever, and just like with Smallville, all the stories that makes the character what he is, the heart and substance that has engrained him our culture through the comics remains untold in this medium. And that is something I find incredibly disappointing, because I have dreamed of seeing that for years; and largely dismissed the possibility for the longest time, because no one was doing that on television, you rarely saw superheroes brought to life outside of movies. And now that it's a common thing, Batman (and Superman, among many others) are just too precious a commodity to degrade it with a live action serial....

Damn right I'm the Queen. 

Looks like Lea Thompson wants to have a second go at Howard.

filmschoolrejects.com/lea-thompson-howard-the-duck/