Amazed by all the high star reviews here. Did they see the same show I did???
Without the established lore of Batman there'd be no show here. EVERYTHING is 100% relying on the mythos that is the Batman to carry EVERYTHING.
So far, there has only been the premiere, but I gotta say.. it's VERY lackluster. If one were to remove all the callbacks to past characters, there's no show here. Remove the "bat" from the picture and you've got 1 rich kid, and 4 "other side of the tracks" kids, and 1 kid somewhere in the middle. The rich kid attends a Prep school.. so he MUST be 16-17 years old(?). That gets extrapolated to the rest of the kids.. so teenagers.... Not young adults.... teenagers. I think, in part, the writers do not want the audience to realize the actual age range here.
The fact that Wayne took in yet ANOTHER lost boy.. well.. it's getting kind of creepy just at face value. Did he intentionally go looking for "lost boys" to take in??? Once sure. Twice possibly.... but 3 or 4 times? There's some other motive.
What really sat poorly with me was "Cruella" - Who names their kid that??? And she "grew up" in Arkham Asylum???? They have a day care at an insane asylum??? Housing for families?? Seriously??
I would really need to spoil some things to explain more, but I won't.
Over all I'm being generous with 4 stars. The acting is merely passable, not great. The story COULD be intriguing IF they stop relying on the "lore" so much and flesh out actual individual characters that are NOT merely kiddy-clones of their parents. I find it so ludicrous when writers create "children" that are nothing more than exact replicas of the original characters (parents). We all know that sure.. children grow up to the identical clones in BOTH profession and personality of their parents.. right?
The "color washing" to desaturate everything except reds and purples bothered me as well. CLEARLY everything has been muted to be grey and woeful... but the pops of red and purple don't REALLY mean anything. If it doesn't LOOK like reality, the "suspension of disbelief" factor tends to slip away rather rapidly - why EVERYTHING needs to be desaturated doesn't seem to make any sense.
....meh.. perhaps written for tweens....
