Picture yourself in a dark alley. You’re walking home from the theater, having just seen one of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy; when suddenly, you hear the sounds of combat. You scan the area excitedly, hoping to catch a sighting of the Dark Knight - but instead, you see a kid wearing a cape and cowl kicking over a garbage can. That feeling of disappointment is somewhat akin to what I felt while watching the first season of the CW’s Arrow.

I approached this show with optimism. The aforementioned trilogy is one of my favorite works of art ever, and I hoped — perhaps foolishly — that the CW could replicate that experience. Despite trying its hardest, Arrow comes off more as a disjointed pantomime of the Batman aesthetic than an original TV series with its own ideas. 

The premise of the show is relatively simple. The son of an extremely affluent family returns to his home, a crime ridden metropolis, after several years missing. To the public he is Oliver Queen: a narcissistic, ever-partying socialite. In secret, he hunts down criminals connected to his father’s death and brings them to justice. Ex-girlfriends, family drama, run-ins with the police, and unnecessary subplots fill the rest of the space in the 40+ minute episodes. 

Just like most shows, it’s a mixed bag. Some characters, like Emily Bett Rickards’s Felicity and John Barrowman’s Malcolm Merlyn, are clever, well acted, and likeable; but this is far from the norm. Most others appear to be written just to fill a role in the script. For example, Paul Blackthorne’s gruff police chief Quentin Lance shows up once an episode like clockwork, investigates a crime scene, complains that he doesn’t like Oliver, and leaves. His role is to create a secondary threat to the protagonist, and he somewhat succeeds, but one begins to wonder if he doesn’t have anything better to do than bother the city’s aristocracy all day. The characters as a whole aren’t interesting or likable enough to survive much beyond their base role. 

Contrast this to the Batman property this show so desperately wants to be. The characters — down to the most minor — are memorable and impeccably cast. It’s almost farcical to compare greats such as Bane or the Joker to the forced edginess of Starling City’s supervillains. 

This isn’t to say that the show never *ahem* follows its own arrow, and when it does, it soars far above the mediocrity that inevitably comes with trying to replicate the Dark Knight trilogy’s greatness. It’s a shame the creators put so little credence in originality, because Green Arrow could’ve soared instead of seeming like a cheap knockoff of DC’s more popular vigilante.