The CW showed off a teaser at this year’s New York Comic-Con for its recently premiered super hero adaptation.
In my review of the premiere episode, I pointed out that there were very few connection between Arrow and its source material, DC Comics’ Green Arrow, other than the characters’ names, and even those are only half there (since none of the ‘super hero names’ were retained). This was basically a reinforcement of the impression that we had been getting from all of the trailers, promos, and interviews leading up to the episode, so it was not a surprise.
What was a surprise, however was the teaser that was shown at NYCC, which clearly represents the show as being influenced by the comics:
Of course, they’ll want to cut the teaser in such a way as to appeal to the fans of the comics when they
show it at Comic-Con, but it still shows that there is at least some influence from the books. There are even some more comicbookesque costumes in here, including a version of Oliver’s costume which looks a lot more like Green Arrow than the one he was wearing during his adventures in the pilot.
Pilots always have some aspects which are represented differently than the following series, but some of this stuff looks like it’s from a completely different show. Arrow is already a good drama, perhaps in the next few episodes it will be let to morph into a good comic book inspired drama, somehting the pilot refused to be.
Also interesting to see here is our first look at John Barrowman’s role in the show. Barrowman has done little outside of his role on Doctor Who and Torchwood, Captain Jack Harkness, and here it seems he will be playing a business man who is only referred to in the press material as “Well Dressed Man.”
From this teaser it looks like he’s some sort of friend of the Queen family, or at least involved in Oliver’s mother’s machinations. He will be introduced in episode 5, but we don’t know how many episodes his character will be sticking around.
I’m interested to see what kind of range the actor has, since I’ve really only seen him play ‘horny space cowboy’. I know he had a different sort of role in Desperate Housewives (the only other highly visible role he’s had), apparently he was a ‘horny eco-terrorist’, I guess? but I can’t bring myself to check it out.
New episodes of Arrow air on The CW on Wednesday evenings. If you missed the pilot, you can catch it on the show’s website.
