Viva DCTVWhen it comes to superhero movies the discerning cineaste knows that the next big thing will be winter's first brush with Dr. Strange. It's a great thing that Spring's "Captain America: Civil War" was such a gooey surprise, a slice of high quality superfolk bread forming one half of a "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" shit sandwich with "Deadpool" in February being the other crap-enfolding slice of delicious cinematic wholegrain sliced.
Yup. In the movies the news is all going Marvel's way. And to the casual observer they may appear to have the television side of things locked down as well. With Agents of SHIELD pulling in good (but not great) numbers and the monstrous success of the Netflix Marvel TV Universe you might make the mistake of thinking that Marvel have the TV side of things well in hand. But, there are problems with dominating the small screen viewership that Marvel just doesn't have at the movies. 
Currently there are four problems and they're called the Green Arrow, Flash, Supergirl and the Legends of Tomorrow. DC has a less than anaemic line of super television that has manifested in its own TV universe whole and complete in the last year. Not that the DC television universe doesn't have issues. But what multi-platform universe doesn't have problems? What's so surprising about DC's quiet coup in the stakes of comic book television with the most potential is how low it's flown under the radar. The accepted wisdom would tell you that Arrow and The Flash had villain problems, that Legends of Tomorrow is way too goofy and that Supergirl is on a different network anyway, or at least was on a different network until late in the first season. Okay, I'm willing to concede, problems are real. Even so, DC have quietly introduced a shared universe containing many of its second-string properties to new and receptive audiences all under the stewarding of Greg Berlanti who can be thought of as the DC TV-Verse equivalent to Marvel’s Kevin Feige. While the Berlanti-verse (AKA the Arrow-verse) has some issues it is worth noting that it also has a great deal of potential, arguably more than Marvel’s Netflix-verse. Let’s take a look at the reasons why the Arrow-verse has the potential to outstrip its Marvel rivals. 
While it is undeniable that the Marvel Netflix-verse is making the money it needs to it probably isn’t making as much as shows that occur on actual network television. The big clue that this is the case is in the ever-growing number of effects shots and CG pumped into the Arrow-verse. Arrow started the whole thing off relatively grounded sticking to ninjas and martial arts for a while before deciding to go full-on “mystical” but the Flash, Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow all up the ante on the action and outlandishness giving us a clue as to a more generous production purse. Using a traditional network television model pays off for the members of the Arrow-verse in that crossovers can be cross-promoted as “special events” first airings have a fixed time and channel, it’s therefore relatively easier to plan out the chronology across the episodes of the shows involved. Marvel have yet to equal the Legends of Tomorrow set-up crossover event that occurred across Arrow and Flash, they probably weren’t even considering anything that ambitious. Luke Cage has appeared in Jessica Jones and Daredevil has locked horns with the Punisher but narratives do not hop merrily from an episode in one series to an episode in another. It would be logistically difficult for the Netflix-verse to do this as each season is released on its own with several months betweern drops of new material. 
The key word here is “goofy” a lot of people I know who don’t like the Arrow-verse are not very tolerant of goofy nonsense. Hard luck to those guys because I am having tons of fun. The most coherent of the current properties is the Flash which somehow manages to pull off “Earth-2” and Man-Shark hybrids whilst still delivering a core of melodrama to keep the whole thing engaging. Legends of Tomorrow (Which may as well be called “DC does Doctor Who with the Avengers as his companions” if being descriptive was the only measure of an effective title.) scores high on goofy fun but because it keeps jumping time periods, insulating the core cast as an ensemble, it feels a bit loose on the rails. Still with Hawkgirl, the Atom and Firestorm all in one place the big fights with heroes swooping back and forth through the air are a delight for your inner child. In fact, delight for your inner child is what most of the current Arrow-verse is about, which is where Arrow has started to have problems. If Flash, LoT and Supergirl are all about chunky fun Arrow is where all the moody resides in this new crossover universe. Ironically Arrow’s darker tone is what got the ball rolling in the first place. In its first two seasons Arrow seemed like an excellent televisual companion to things like The Dark Knight Rises and Man of Steel. Since the rest of the Arrow-verse has filled with speedsters and meta-humans, time travellers and aliens Arrow has started to explore a really tricky identity crisis. The high point of season 4 was, for me at any rate, the crossover with the sadly defunct Constantine show. As Arrow previously gave rise to the Atom, the Flash brought us Firestorm and Supergirl gave us [Redacted for Spoileriffic reasons] it would seem that if Arrow wanted to get more mystical adding Constantine as a regular could do no harm whatsoever. Despite the overblown ambitions of season four’s Damien Darhk I cannot bring myself to believe that having Neal McDonough as a smug warlock in anything could possibly make it worse. Arrow needs to grasp the magic schtick and run with it, unafraid, to join the other shows in the world of high-concept genre fun or it loses itself in mundane ninja-based melodrama, and that’s no good for anyone. 
Although the movie division is doing its best to throw a spanner in that potential. Fans of Arrow’s take on the “Suicide Squad” were no doubt dismayed that it got unceremonously canned after Season 3 of Arrow. The reason for this rewrite was that WB wanted to do a movie of the Suicide Squad and didn’t want competition (?) from their own television wing. "Gotham" suffered as well, losing their proto-Joker, but who really cares about that? Thankfully the fact that the Flash as portrayed by Grant Gustin will co-exist with the Flash portrayed by an actor destined only to be thought of as “not Grant Gustin”. For this reason one has to imagine that the loss of the Suicide Squad was all about the fact that maybe they didn’t fit into a loud, bright, hopeful vision of the Arrow-verse that the four shows are now at liberty to present. And this is really important, because one of the key things about shows like Supergirl and The Flash is that they’re great for a slightly younger audience. Don’t get me wrong I’ve seen showings of The Avengers: Age of Ultron filled with younger viewers enthralled by the latest Marvel adventure, but I doubt many younger viewers are aware of Jessica Jones’ issues with the Purple Man on Netflix. That’s really important, because everyone can watch way more TV than they can movies, just due to logistics. I’ve watched every MCU movie and I love them all. Even so, I’ve spent more time with Barry Allen in the last two years than I have with any one Marvel character since 2007. In point of fact the only characters I’ve been given the opportunity to get to know as well are the Agents of SHIELD and, honestly, I think many of their strongest characters have been properly mishandled. Adrianne Palicki’s Bobbi Morse, AKA Mockingbird, is a case in point. Agent Morse didn’t even appear in the show until season two and then was written out in season three to make a new Marvel show that didn’t even get picked up. If we take a moment to compare that disaster with WB’s handling of Caity Lotz’s Black/White Canary we can see how DC is spending some time nurturing its TV characters. By the time White Canary set off on time travelling adventures with the hilariously named Rip Hunter we’d already seen the character make regular appearances in two seasons of Arrow. There’s so much more sense of wild growth in the Arrow-verse, characters have gone in some pretty weird directions, and that means future characters have the potential to grow and develop in an environment where bad guys can turn good and vice versa, ninjas can be resurrected, techno-heroes can try their hand at time-travel and speedsters can run faster than reality itself. All these things are like an even fizzier version of the MCU but boiled into yummy TV candy, where Marvel TV appears to be aiming for a mature audience who would like the dark tone of the DC movies if they made any sense. So it’s not like Marvel couldn’t also start bringing the fun to TV, it just doesn’t appear to be on the schedule at present. So call me back when we’re running a full crossover shared universe detailing the weekly adventures of Squirrel Girl, Madrox the Multiple Man, Howard the Duck and She-Hulk. Until then I’ll be waiting for that Supergirl/Flash crossover where [Redacted for spoileriffic reasons] visits Central City. Is the DCTV getting the upper hand on Marvel? What do you think? Let us know in the comments! 
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