PILOT LIGHTS 2012: ARROW

With the ratings success of Smallville, it was perhaps a matter of time before America’s 'The CW' channel  looked to the wider stable of DC characters.

Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) and his father have been missing for five years, presumed dead when their luxury yacht, Queen’s Gambit, was lost at sea. It turns out that while Queen Snr. apparently met his demise, Oliver has been doing a passing impression of Robinson Crusoe or Tom Hanks and doing what he needed to survive in the wild. As we’re to learn, this convenient and mysterious island may have been more like the one in Lost  (which is actually given a name-check/punchline) rather than the Hawaiian idyle.  After many years a fishing boat comes along (one can only presume it’s not on a regular route?) and Oliver is whisked back to civilisation and his entitled, party-filled lifestyle.  It’s worth noting that this all happens in the first five minutes of the show…

His friends and family have all moved on in different ways and though Oliver makes the pretence of falling back into his more hedonistic ways, it’s clear he actually has a more socially-aware agenda. One that involves a lot of arrows and a green hood… on both a real and metaphorical way.

“The face I see in the mirror is a stranger…” Oliver narrates with undue gravitas to the audience as the camera decides to pan from stubbly chin to the perfect abs and loosely-fitting towel around his waist. Yes, it’s pretty clear that the young female demographic wll be well catered for.

Sadly – and surprisingly – the green-screen visual effects are unexpectedly terrible, the type of which a television show could have boasted about around the time Oliver got shipwrecked but now look very shiny yet unconvincing.  Equally, the sets look like, well… sets. No rocking from side to side aboard the Queen’s Gambit will make it look like it’s really at sea and the lifestyles of the rich and infamous look strangely generic and pulled from a billionnaire version of Ikea.   

The bane of pilot-plotting is the need for some exposition, but here the first half creaks like a badly-made bow. When people walk into rooms there is literally the moment where their character name is proclaimed, their relationship defined  and followed by the obligatory “…and I haven’t seen you in years!”  Potentially unscrupulous-types glance awkwardly at each other signposting their deceit or bark orders like an amateur A-Team adversary or actual script-direction. The nearest thing to real post-traumatic stress disorder appears to be losing a  platinum credit-card. This doesn’t feel a script, more like a clinical, formulaic blueprint with delusions of adequacy.

However - and it's quite a big 'however' - the interesting thing is that, despite all of the above, there’s clearly a better action show trying to get out. Yes, it’s clear there’s a huge suspension of disbelief (and we only have to wait a while before a police-officer suggests the inevitable “We’ll put an APB out on Robin Hood…”) but the pilot begins to finally impress when it gets to the action. For a series about a guy with a bow taking on people with the arsenal of small armies, that element comes across about as convincingly as it ever could hope. Amell clearly performs a certain amount of his own stunts and is in good enough shape not to simply impress the ladies but also pull-off convincing hand-to-hand  fight sequences.  Equally, while Smallville kept its hero as the last boy scout, there are multiple deaths in the pilot, some unflinchingly at Oliver’s literal hands – both by arrow and neck-breaking. It would be inaccurate to call it anywhere approaching ‘gritty’  and most are inferred rather than shown in any detail, but every so often it tilts into territory which may have caused a flurry of internal memos in the marketing department.

The pilot’s denouement is excellently executed on a technical and visual level, though anyone who saw Kick-Ass will have an unerring sense of deja-vu about entering and taking down a bad-guy’s army (albeit through a 12A-rated filter). 

Ultimately, the pilot is all set-up, introductions and glossy set-pieces. Logic takes a firm back-seat to action and there’s a distinct whiff of daytime soap-opera theatrics, but, yes, there’s that glimpse of some potential and we do finish on a nice sleight of-hand that most won’t see coming.

There’s a very good chance that there will be a tug-of-war for the heart of ‘Arrow’ as it makes its way through its initial season, with some wanting it to be 90210 meets  a lite-version of The Equalizer… and some recognising that there’s the chance of something edgier and less morally defined.

One suspects where the ‘safe’ money will go, so we’ll have to see if what we get is Sherwood or Hollywood.

7/10