FOX TO AIR GOTHAM — MINUS BATMAN

The Fox TV network is getting into the thriving superhero business — sort of. It announced on Tuesday that it had won the bidding for Gotham, to be produced by Warner Bros. TV, which owns the rights to the DC Comics characters. In this case, the character is Commissioner Jim Gordon, the police chief of Gotham in the Batman comics, who was played by Gary Oldman in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. (Inasmuch as the TV series is being referred to as a prequel, it is expected that Gordon will not have attained the rank of police commissioner.) While Bruce Wayne and Batman are not expected to make an appearance in the series, the London Independent indicated today (Wednesday) that it will likely be “the first DC live-action series to create the same dark, sinister mood of the comics and the Nolan films.” The series is being overseen by Bruno Heller, creator of CBS’s hit series The Mentalist. Word of the deal was first reported by Deadline.com. Readers’ comments were swift and overwhelmingly negative. “The Batman universe is overdone to tears, you wouldn’t see them making a Young Perry White or a General Sam Lane [Superman characters] series,” one DC Comics fan wrote in the Deadline comment box. Another observed that Gordon “is helpless without Batman and if you don’t have Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson then Gotham City is just another Chicago or Detroit with horrible crime and nobody to save the city.”