Putative Green Arrow Pilot Gets Putative Black Canary

Alright, I’ll admit it: we haven’t done a post about the CW ordering a Green Arrow pilot. Why? Because this is the fourth time the CW’s name has been connected to a proposed TV series based on a DC Comics character in the past year, and we still haven’t seen anything concrete out of any of them. First, the CW greenlit a pilot based on Raven, the Teen Titans character, and has done nothing since. Then, the CW turned down the (by all accounts terrible) pilot for Wonder Woman. A few months later, a Deadman show, written and produced by the creator of Supernatural, made a few headlines, and then disappeared.

So you’ll forgive me if I’m not too optimistic about a Green Arrow show getting off the ground… but we now know for sure that if it does, it’ll have Oliver Queen’s longtime flame and kickass superhero in her own right Black Canary in the middle of the action as well.

DC Women Kicking Ass has noticed a casting sheet for a floating around the internet, and second billing on it goes to Dinah “Laurel” Lance, the secret (or not so secret, depending on when in comics history we’re talking about) identity of Black Canary:

28 years old, smart sexy, Laurel is a legal aid attorney determined to use her life as a one-woman war against the 1% following the death of her younger sister Sara. A sister, who as luck would have it, just so happened to have died aboard Oliver’s yacht.

Oliver’s yacht presumably refers to the boat which sank with all hands in the South China Sea five years before the start of the pilot, with Oliver as the only known survivor.

We’ll see if the show actually makes it to airing. The CW is notoriously looking for something to replace the decade of fan dedication that Smallville awarded them with, and since they’ve got all of the DC Universe to dip into, we hope they find something they like sooner rather than later. Will Green Arrow fit the bill? Hard to say. Arrow’s stories are generally less supernaturally inclined than Superman’s, even a young Superman with limited powers. Judging by the casting sheet, the pilot as planned may be more about Oliver’s family dynamics and the impact that his return from the presumed-dead has on the people around him. The closest we’ve got to a villain is Oliver’s remarried mother who may have done some shady dealings with the family money since his father’s death and is worried that his father will also return and take it all back from her and oh yawn the Clytemnestra archetype works so much better when she’s actually got a reason to hate her ex…

But I digress. If there’s anything about the pilot that will appeal to the CW, I’m guessing it’ll be the family drama angle and the 1%/99% connections. We’ll have to wait and see, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t see anything at all.

(via DC Women Kicking Ass.)