Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Gotham Knights’ On The CW, Where Turner Hayes Teams With A Criminal Crew To Investigate Bruce Wayne’s Death

Despite its desire to change its programming to meet its demographics, the CW is still in the DC universe business for now. Its newest entry takes place in Gotham City, but it doesn’t involve Bruce Wayne or Batman. In fact, Bruce Wayne starts this series in a pool of blood after being thrown out of a window in Wayne Tower.

GOTHAM KNIGHTS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A generic cityscape shot. “After my parents were murdered, I was adopted by the richest man in the city,” says a young voice.

The Gist: Turner Hayes (Oscar Morgan) seems to be living a charmed life. Bruce Wayne (David Miller) adopted him after his parents were murdered and took him from the darkest slums of Gotham City. Wayne has been busy at work lately, so after a fencing practice, Turner throws a party at Wayne Manor. There, he sees his best friend Stephanie Brown (Anna Lore) making out in the study and is introduced to a glasses-clad girl named Carrie Kelly (Navia Robinson).

In the meantime, three thieves are breaking into Wayne’s office in Wayne Tower: Harper Row (Fallon Smythe), her brother Cullen (Tyler DiChiara) and Duela (Olivia Rose Keegan), who perhaps not coincidentally is the daughter of the Joker. Harper cracks the safe, only to see that there’s an old gun inside. Then they see a shattered window, “YOUR BAT IS DEAD” scrawled on it. Bruce Wayne is dead on the ground, his Batman cowl on, and they’re being set up to take the fall.

District Attorney Harvey Dent (Misha Collins), a personal friend of the Wayne family, leads the investigation; he is the one who reveals to Turner that his father was Batman. Shocked that Wayne would hide that fact, he and Stephanie manage to find the Batcave; there, amateur hacker Stephanie uses the powerful computer to find out the source of the money that the trio got to be framed for Wayne’s murder.

When it turns out that he’s also being set up, Dent reluctantly arrests him and throws him in a cell with the accused murderers. The four of them, though, eventually figure out who is setting them all up, and why if they don’t escape GCPD’s clutches soon, they’ll all be dead. They get help n that regard from Carrie, who just happens to be Robin, Batman’s trusty companion.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Take Gotham and mix it with Riverdale and you have Gotham Knights.

Our Take: Gotham Knights suffers not from bad, but from being generic. There are elements of the first episode, like Olivia Rose Keegan’s performance as Duela, that we found enjoyable. But there were also a lot of bad lines of dialogue that were woodenly delivered by the people saying them, and a complete lack of any backstory that anyone but the diehard fans of DC Comics could latch onto.

But what bugged us more about the show is that it just feels like something we’ve seen a million times. With just that barest of backstory, Turner Hayes just becomes yet another young, handsome protagonist with a mysteriously dark history. The trio he connects with in order to solve his father’s murder has skills but — at least in the case of the brother and sister — not much in the way of personality. The interrogation conducted by Dent and GCPD Detective Ford (Joel Keller — the Canadian actor, not me) reveals those hints of backstory, but hides others. It’s especially galling when Det. Ford refers to Cullen in a way that implies that he’s transgender, but the writing around that is coy at best, teasing at worst.

We do appreciate the attempt by writers Natalie Abrams, Chad Fiveash, and James Stoteraux to diversify the DC universe with people of color and people in the LGBTQIA+ community. Making Robin a teenage girl was a nice touch. But right now, these characters aren’t distinctive enough to make this diversification be anything but symbolic.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Duela recites the mantra of a secret society that the group discovers has a lot to do with their predicament, as one of their members gets killed in a very violent way.

Sleeper Star: K.K. Moggie plays Cressida Clarke, Turner’s guardian and mentor; she’s basically what Alfred was to Bruce Wayne. However, she certainly isn’t on the side of good, at least not by what we see in the first episode.

Most Pilot-y Line: There’s a lot of dumb lines in this pilot, but Turner saying a weak, “I know, I’m sorry” when Duela tells him that he almost got them killed was just a head smack. It felt like he was apologizing for raiding the liquor cabinet instead of, you know, almost getting everyone killed.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Gotham Knights just left no impression on us, which is deadly for any show, but especially one that’s trying to be a Batman series without Batman.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.