I’m going to go out on a limb and assume some meddling studio executive was the one who insisted on all of the name-dropping in the first episode of Gotham. Surely no sane creator with a vision for a Batman-themed TV show would insist on such silly pandering. Surely some executive was nervous about mainstream audiences picking up on the source material and insisted that Edward Nygma show up for 5 seconds to crack riddles, or that several different characters would tell Oswald Cobblepot that he looks like a penguin.

Because otherwise, Gotham doesn’t have much faith in its audience to not be idiots.

TV Rating: 6/10 – Pretty Good.

I’m going to try not to focus too much on the random character cameos because that’s what everybody is talking about (and Dorkly did it best). Suffice to say, I don’t think they make or break the show. I think they’re the byproduct of somebody higher up desperately trying to push the Batman elements of a show that can stand without them. They’re training wheels for a kid who can pedal just fine on his own.

The sort of people who are going to watch Gotham understand what it’s about, and we’re capable of being patient. We don’t need to be reminded every 5 minutes of another Batman character. I sincerely hope this was just an affliction of the pilot, and that future episodes will behave themselves.

Nobody likes a name-dropper.

I liked the first episode of Gotham, but I also think it was a very unpolished episode. A show like Gotham should crack with the energy and efficiency of an episode of Law and Order. It should establish itself as a cop show first and foremost, and then prove it’s the most interesting cop show with its characters and world. But in the first episode, Gotham seems a little bloated with clunky dialogue, bad efforts at campy humor and an all-around sense of trying desperately to live up to its own expectations for itself. It wants to be this awesome combination of cop show and superhero show, but it’s not quite sure how to achieve that.

Fortunately, being the pilot, a little shoddiness is excusable. Gotham has a whole season to tighten the plotting, the dialogue and the character development.

And I will definitely be around for the whole season.

Join me after the jump or my full review.

Rather infamously at this point, Gotham is the Batman TV show without Batman. The pilot opens with the murders of Thomas and Martha Wayne, and the future vigilante is only a 12-year-old boy, still grieving over the loss of his family. Some people might think this is a crazy idea, but I’m not one of them – I think this is a great idea!

(Don’t get me wrong, a Batman TV show would be amazing. But if you can’t do Batman because of the movies, then a show like Gotham is tailor-made for television.)

TV is flooded with cop shows. They’re a staple. There will always be cop shows. So if you’re going to make another one, why not base one around the most fascinating and famous police departments of all time? The Gotham City Police Department is almost as storied as Batman himself. They’re not just ‘the cops in a Batman comic’, they’re a character all their own, with loose morals, fascinating characters and its own special kind of development. The GCPD is perfect fodder for a TV show.

Which is why they already made a successful comic book about it.

Read it!

Gotham Central is one of my all-time favorite comic books. It’s about the detectives in the Major Crimes Unit of the GCPD, investigating and arresting the various super-villains who plague the city. Batman can’t respond to every crime in Gotham, the police still have to do their jobs. Gotham Central was great, with a strong focus on the police officers and their jobs, turning the fantastical into the mundane. How does a normal beat cop stand up to Mr. Freeze? That kind of thing.

But the big difference between Gotham Central and Gotham is that the latter can’t feature Batman or his Rogues Gallery, at least not as we know them. Gotham is a prequel, stuck in a time when villains and vigilantes are barely getting started. But I don’t think this is a bad thing at all. Gotham City itself is still a dark, crime-ridden place, and the GCPD is still as corrupt and shiftless as its ever been. How many cop shows feature a department that is entirely corrupt? That should make for some good TV.

Once they smooth out the rough edges and get settled, that is. Even TV shows have growing pains.

Speaking of growing pains…

Right from the start, I like the characters involved – most of them, at least. Ben McKenzie plays a young Jim Gordon, and works well as an honest cop put in some pretty gnarly situations. The great thing about Jim Gordon was that he was a good guy before Batman ever came along, and McKenzie plays him just right. Gordon’s not an idiot. He’s not going to let his morals get him killed. But he can do what little he can to try to clean up the city and its police force. He’s the sort of guy who can have a pleasant conversation with a mob boss and not just try and arrest him on the spot. Gordon is noble without being a lunatic about it.

I like a hero whose earnest, and I think McKenzie will do a solid job. I was less interested in his wife Barbara, played by Erin Richards. She seemed too pretty and too blonde to be a real person. And they give her that horribly cliche scene where she randomly appears in the police station to say she hasn’t seem Jim in awhile, and she’s worried about him, only to simply walk off content when Harvey Bullock tells her Jim is fine. There was no better way to let Bullock know his partner was in trouble?

If the cliche fits…

Harvey Bullock is pretty great in the pilot, played by the legendary Donal Logue. Has he reached legendary status yet? I’m a huge Logue fan, and I loved his brief detective show, Terriers. Now that was a well built show, with charm, personality and purpose right from the get go. Logue doesn’t inhabit Bullock as well as he did Hank Dolworth, but he’s getting there. Bullock is the sort of cop whose already on the take to the mob, but he’s got enough heart to start bonding with Gordon right away. They’re partners on the Wayne homicide, no matter how sloppy Bullock might be as a cop.

For example, that hair

A friend of mine was disappointed that Bullock is revealed to be crooked in the first episode, but I’m pretty sure that’s the point. Bullock has only just met Jim Gordon. I would imagine Bullock’s story arc in the first season, if not the show, is to be influenced and re-shaped by Gordon. And I know Logue is more than capable of handling character development like that, so I look forward to seeing Bullock bloom.

The rest of the GCPD is largely forgettable in the first episode. Their boss, Captain Essen, barely gets a scene (and I doubt she’s going to get to have that affair with Gordon, like in the comics). Detectives Renee Montoya and Crispus Allen show up as rival cops, but I didn’t quite understand how their relationship to Bullock and Gordon worked. Montoya and Allen are members of the Major Crimes Unit, which, I assume, would be staffed by detectives who investigate major crimes like homicides. So what sort of detectives are Bullock and Gordon? Why does the GCPD have competing detective divisions?

I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical answer, the pilot just didn’t provide one. Instead, it just used Montoya and Allen (two characters who were prominent in Gotham Central) to needle Bullock for the fun of it. Hopefully they get a bit more depth this season. It helps that Gotham isn’t going to shy away from Renee Montoya’s sexuality. Hopefully that doesn’t mean she gets killed in a later episode.

A real stand out player in the pilot was Robin Lord Taylor as Oswald Cobblepot, the future Penguin. He’s just a lowly mob nobody in the pilot, holding umbrellas for more important mobsters, but Taylor creates a really devious, sickening sort of soul, who delights in hurting others and looks just creepy enough to seem slightly less than human.

Get it? Cause he likes umbrellas!

Watching Cobblepot develop a backbone and rise back up the criminal ranks should be entertaining. He could be the harbinger of all the evil about to hit Gotham in a few years.

Jada Pinkett Smith brings some acting skill and class to mob boss Fish Mooney, a new character created for the show. She’s a very campy sort of character, but that doesn’t make her any less interesting. Being the comic book geek that I am, I wasn’t as interested in her as I should have been, but I think she’ll make a nice addition to the cast. And actor John Doman shows up at the end of the episode as mafia godfather Carmine Falcone, perfectly inhabiting the role of noble criminal, someone who still abides by the ‘rules’ of organized crime. I think he’ll make for a great big bad, especially as his city fills with freaks he can no longer control.

Played by that guy we all know from that one thing…

Camren Bicondova is a non-entity as a young Selina Kyle, but David Mazouz creates a pretty solid Bruce Wayne. He’s grief-stricken shortly after his parents are killed, but already by the end of the episode he’s clearly hardening. I’m not quite sure what role he’s going to have in the series, unless Gordon randomly keeps visiting Wayne Manor to have daily chats with a 12-year-old. Sean Pertwee plays Alfred the butler a bit harder than I’d like, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it. Not everybody can simply recreate Alfred from Batman: The Animated Series.

Gotham has a solid cast behind it, and a premise that should work like gang-busters. I definitely get the feeling that the creators know what they’re doing, or at least they know what they want to do. They have a solid vision for the series. But growing pains and opening day jitters keep the first episode from soaring. Several characters are clunkily included, a lot of the dialogue has yet to figure out what type of show this is supposed to be, and there’s an overall sense that the production might be trying to bite off more than it can chew.

But like I said, I hope this is just the typical nonsense a pilot episode has to deal with. You’ve got to hook your audience fast in today’s TV market, and Gotham throws out everything they can to get people hooked. I can’t fault them for that.

I just hope they get it right going forward.

Also, before I go, who the hell puts the prisoner holding cells in the same room as the police bullpen?! What’s to stop some criminal lowlife from pestering a detective who’s trying to work at his desk?!