Who Thought Now Would Be the Right Time for a Gotham Cop Show?

Displaying a truly mind-boggling refusal to read the cultural room, HBO Max and director Matt Reeves announced a new police show set in Gotham City. The series—which doesn’t have a title, though it’s been nicknamed Gotham Central after the comics series—will be written and produced by Boardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter, and will be set in the same universe as Reeves’ upcoming movie The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson and Jeffrey Wright.

According to HBO Max (via The Hollywood Reporter), the series will be “set in the world Reeves is creating for The Batman feature film and will build upon the motion picture’s examination of the anatomy of corruption in Gotham City, ultimately launching a new Batman universe across multiple platforms. The series provides an unprecedented opportunity to extend the world established in the movie and further explore the myriad of compelling and complex characters of Gotham.”

First of all, there’s no word as to whether Pattinson will be a part of the series, and we already had a Batmanless Gotham cop show: Gotham.

More importantly, though, is the fact that cop shows are finally being widely recognized as the obsolete propaganda they’ve always been. Full-on copaganda shows like Cops are getting canceled; Brooklyn Nine-Nine is reckoning with its role in the way entertainment softens the image of the police. A lot of people are finding cop-based entertainment especially distasteful right now, following weeks of protests against police violence and murders. Does anyone really want to sit down and watch a show about the notoriously corrupt fictional police running and ruining Gotham City? It’s not like those cops are going to be portrayed as heroes, it just doesn’t sound like a very enjoyable watch!

(via THR, image: Fox)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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