Gotham Embraced Ridiculousness and Found Its Best Self

It's difficult to identify Gotham's worst moment - there's a lot of competition for that particular honor. But it might well have been the show's third episode, "The Balloonman," in which James Gordon and Harvey Bullock quite earnestly hunt a masked vigilante who is murdering corrupt individuals by tying them to weather balloons.

There are fewer options when trying to determine the show's best moment. I'm partial to the close of "Unleashed," which comes near the end of the show's second season, in which Penguin and his underling Butch use a rocket launcher to blow up the seemingly invulnerable Theo Galavan, brainwashed into believing he's the avenging paladin Azrael. After the deed is done, Penguin waddles away, while Butch waves a jaunty goodbye and wishes Gordon, Alfred and Bruce Wayne a good night.

The Why of "Better"

It's not always easy identifying or articulating how or why a show has improved. Sometimes there's a new actor or a new showrunner or an exciting new storyline, more money for production design or special effects. But there's often some ephemeral, hard-to-pinpoint thing that wasn't there when the show began.

ABC's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D is a good example of the second dynamic. That the show is much better now than it was for most of its first season is essentially indisputable. Identifying the "why" is more difficult - you have to dig deep (the show has refined its core relationships, the actors are more comfortable in their roles, the writers have largely abandoned standalone episodes in favor of serialized storylines), and even then there's an element of post facto reasoning to the exercise.

Gotham is a somewhat similar example. The show, as it has since its pilot episode, blows through plot at a reckless pace, and its stories, at their best, do not stand up to careful scrutiny - and are utterly preposterous at their worst. It's still too reliant on generating audience goodwill by showing us people who are related (or even just similar) to iconic Batman characters. And it still has just two settings for its female characters - boring love interest and violent psychopath.

And yet, Gotham IS better than it was. It is, in fact, one of television's more consistently entertaining shows, even if we're compelled to admit it's nowhere near one of the medium's best, and that it even falls short of "good" status.

But for all its flaws, Gotham is genuinely fun. And it got there by abandoning all pretensions of genuine quality.

Finding the Right Tone

Gotham's first season was defined, as every professional critic observed, by its jarring tonal inconsistencies. These didn't just show up from episode to episode - individual scenes would be riven by these tonal shifts. Every actor seemed to be performing in a completely different show - Jada Pinkett Smith was channeling Eartha Kitt from the campy 60's Batman series, Donal Logue was playing the Jerry Orbach character in a bloody Law and Order reboot and Cory Michael Smith (playing Edward Nygma) was trapped in a cutesy romantic comedy. And poor Ben McKenzie was apparently working under the impression that he was in a prestige drama about a good man's fall and redemption, a delusion which would have been hilarious if it wasn't so sad.

 The issue was not so much that all of these performances were bad - Pinkett Smith was consistently entertaining, and I always got a kick out of the Nygma-Kristen Kringle dynamic (many, many others did not, it should be noted). The problem was that none of them meshed: a scene with Gordon, Bullock and Pinkett Smith's Fish Mooney would involve Logue wisecracking, Pinkett Smith purring her lines and McKenzie growling and glowering with all of the intensity he could muster. It was a mess.

The show's improvement over the last few years has been tied, above all else, into its ability to settle on the right tone and the right approach to its subject matter. That tone has, from day one, been exemplified by Robin Lord Taylor, the show's breakout performer.

Taylor's Penguin has always been Gotham's best character and most entertaining element. Taylor's performance has never been subtle, but he's always found a way to emotionally convey the character's alienation and ambition without ever losing his sense of fun. Penguin has always been the one character on the show who seems like a comic book character in the best sense - real without being realistic, heightened to the point of exaggeration while still commanding the audience's attention and respect.

Gotham has, in fits and starts, evolved to match Taylor's tone. That evolution is demonstrated by the difference between the two moments I highlighted at the start of this post.

"Balloonman" was the show's attempt to play a ridiculous and cringe-worthy premise with complete seriousness - you can't have two hard-boiled police detectives investigating murder-by-weather-balloon without the whole thing falling apart within the cold open. Gotham asked us to regard the entire scenario as something genuinely threatening (and even instructive for the young Bruce Wayne), and while one can squint really, really hard and imagine a brilliant writer-director combo making that work, Gotham didn't so much fall short as it stepped in a pothole and broke its ankle in front of the entire school within the first 10 seconds of the Homecoming Parade.

"Unleashed," which aired about a year and a half after "Balloonman," understood, by contrast, the ridiculousness of what was on screen and gloried in it. The scene in which Penguin and Butch blow up Galavan/Azrael is largely played for laughs - the episode doesn't expect us to see it as Galavan's tragic end or as a character-building moment for the future Batman. It's funny, and everyone involved plays their roles appropriately.

A Balancing Act

But the key to Gotham's improvement has been its ability to stay on the drama side of the drama/comedy line, if barely. The "Unleashed" scene plays Galavan's death for laughs, but while Taylor is clearly enjoying himself, he still inhabits Penguin's indignation and fearsomeness. That's always been Taylor's gift - his scenes are frequently funny, he is frequently funny, but Penguin remains a genuinely terrifying figure.

There's no doubt that Gotham is campier than it was in its first season, but it has managed to avoid falling completely into caricature. The show's new tone is a kind of dark camp - heightened, ridiculous, but with a Gothic aesthetic and a gleeful embrace of gore aided by some genuinely impressive visual effects.

 Gotham's second season, which marked the beginning of its ascendance, was sub-titled "Rise of the Villains," and its increased focus on the show's bad guys represented a change that was significant as it was welcome. The first season devoted plenty of time to the underworld machinations of Penguin, Fish Mooney and Carmine Falcone (a usually good John Doman, who always seemed out of place on this show), but the second season took all of that scheming, threw in the twisted Galavan siblings, mixed in a centuries-long conspiracy and evil goings on at Arkham Asylum and produced something much more interesting and entertaining.

That dynamic has continued through season three and first two episodes of season four. Gotham's villains - whether you're talking about Penguin, Nygma, Victor Zsasz, Tabitha Galavan (who survived her less fortunate brother) or Barbara Kean (Eric Richards, invigorated after being freed from the need to play Gordon's boring love interest in the first season) - provide a consistent spark of charisma and entertainment.

The "stakes" here are comically low, considering both that Gotham is a prequel and that death has long since lost its meaning on this show (Barbara was killed in the season three finale, but is almost certain to return at some point this year). But the actors playing these villains do so with malevolent glee, and the show embraces the villains' storylines with an enthusiasm it simply can't muster for Gordon, Bullock and Bruce Wayne.

Take, for example, Gotham's ballsy decision to kill off Kristen Kringle (Nygma's love interest) in the second season, then bring the actress back a season later to play a completely unrelated character who happens to look exactly like Kringle and happens to fall in love with Nygma herself. There's no conspiracy there - "Isabella" isn't a distant relation of Kristen Kringle, coming to Gotham City to wreak bloody vengeance on Nygma. She's just a random woman with the exact same face as Ed's dead girlfriend.

And then the show kills her a few episodes later just to drive a wedge between Nygma and Penguin.

There's something breathtaking about that, right? It's so impressively and unnecessarily stupid that it works, somehow.  It's a writing staff committing wholeheartedly to an ill-advised idea, then abruptly pulling the plug because they grew bored with it.  You want to hate it, but you have to admire the chutzpah.

The Aesthetics of Ascendance

All of these improvements in acting and storytelling have been accentuated by the show's distinct aesthetic sensibility. Put simply, Gotham is one of the most gorgeous shows on television, possessing a visual style that syncs perfectly with the show's newer, more successful tone.

Gotham's visual style is a mish-mash of different aesthetics, but it combines them in a way that works far better than it should. The buildings and interiors are all designed in a grandiose Art Deco style - check out this image of Theo Galavan's penthouse from the show's second season (image courtesy of the Gotham wiki):

I would absolutely live here

Street-level scenes, meanwhile, are all grit and grime and urban decay, and the show has never met a grate it didn't think would look better with steam pouring out of it. 

And all of the clothing styles seem like they're frozen in the years between the 30's and 50's, which can create some truly striking visuals, like this shot of Nygma in his 50's-style G-man suit:

Those cheekbones!

Everything about the show's visual palette is heightened and exaggerated - everything is sharp angles and bright colors set against dimness and darkness. None of it is unbelievably over the top, really, but it's all unique to the show, and it helps create the impression of a universe that is similar to ours, but noticeably off.

It's apparent, as we enter Gotham's fourth season, that Gotham is never going to be a great show. The show's plotting remains too enamored of its own twistiness, allegiances change with eye-rolling suddenness, scenes featuring our "heroes" are mostly boring and any real emotional depth (such as the surprising heart and sentiment that defined the Penguin-Riddler relationship early in season three) is quickly subsumed by the show's need for blood and betrayal. 

Still, in our Golden Age of Television, when there's a glut of high-quality prestige shows, there remains a space for Gotham's entertaining, unapologetic ridiculousness.