It's nearly two decades since Danny Cannon directed a well-intentioned but ultimately unsuccessful big screen version of Judge Dredd. But in the years since he's made a solid name for himself in television helming the pilot episodes of the likes of the original CSI franchise and the recent incarnation of Nikita. He also served as executive producer on both those series and the new version of The Tomorrow People.
It now looks as though he's going up to bat on another much-anticpated show with the announcement he will helm the pilot episode of Gotham. The series will chronicle the (in)famous city featured within the DC Comics universe but is set in the days before Batman became its vigilante crime-fighter. Instead the show will focus on the career of James Gordon in his own attempts to keep the city clean and his early experiences with characters and institutions that would later become so prominent. It IS possible we will encounter a young Bruce Wayne, maybe in the wake of the murder of his parents, Thomas and Martha, but the series will not feature the Wayne family prominently except in aspects of possible foreshadowing.
The series has been confirmed by FOX which have already given it a full seaosn order and it is expected to eb a cornerstone of their 2014/2015 broadcast season. There is no news on who will play the character of James Gordon, most recently portrayed by Gary Oldman in the Dark Knight trilogy for Christopher Nolan.
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UPDATED - 14th January: On the FOX press-tour the show's powers-that-be have confirmed that Bruce Wayne WILL factor into the show, though it will only show his pre-Batman years. FOX's chairman Kevin Reilly, indicated it would be an ensemble show chasing the origins of key characters.
"This is all of the classic Batman characters," Reilly states. "It follows the arc of how they all became what they were. I've read the script its really good. It's going to be this operatic soap that has a slightly larger-than-life quality."
Perhaps worryingly think of it as Smallville in an urban setting rather than Homicide: Life on the Gotham Streets?
