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We can thank Arrow‘s Oliver Queen for saving Starling City — and for saving an entire television network, too.
In a new interview with The Showrunner Whisperer podcast, Arrow co-creator and executive producer Marc Guggenheim reveals that after the Stephen Amell-led superhero show earned a pilot order at The CW, Warner Bros. TV chairman Peter Roth “took us out to lunch and basically laid out for us in incredible detail the reality that if Arrow wasn’t a hit, there would be no more CW… Now we also have the pressure of keeping the whole network on the air.”
Arrow wasn’t an easy sell, either, when it debuted on The CW in 2012, Guggenheim remembers: “We were trying to do a superhero show in a way that had never been done before.” The closest thing to it at the time was the WB/CW’s Superman origin story Smallville, he notes, “but Arrow was nothing like Smallville. It was much grittier, it was much darker, it had a lot more action… That made it challenging.”
But the gamble paid off: Arrow became one of The CW’s top-rated shows, with the series premiere becoming the network’s most-watched telecast in three years. Arrow ran for eight seasons and launched a fleet of spinoffs known collectively as the Arrowverse, with The Flash, Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow all running for multiple seasons on The CW, joined later by Batwoman and Black Lightning.
Now Guggenheim looks back on those days fondly — and believes we may not see them again, with The CW now pivoting away from original scripted shows: “I don’t think we could do Arrow today… I don’t think we could have done it with the amount of leeway and creative freedom that we had. It was a very special, unique time in the business.”
And now The CW is a shell of what it once was.
I thought the Arrows did very and was disappointed that it ended! ☹️ and Stephen did an amazing job as the Arrow! 😊
“Saved” is an interesting word choice.
May have extended the network’s life, but in the end it saved nothing and it died an ignominious death. Much like the Arrow-verse itself…
Yeah, that paramedic or doctor didn’t save your life because you died 12 years later.
Saved is true to an extent arrow and others were easy sells to hulu/netflix, the streaming deals made an profitable network, profitable for its owners wb and cbs, the network itself always lost money.
Netflix deal saved network and the end of it killed him
Netflix didn’t end the deals. WB didn’t want to provide contents to competitive streamers. They also want to do their own thing rather than use CW leftover.
No, wb and cbs ended the deal netflix would of extended it 5 more years, the problem was neither Max nor paramount+ were successful and the deal with Netflix served it’s owners well as they paid for a 5 yr window as long as the series whatever series cw made was a drama and had an ending of some sort.
Guaranteed syndication, and that was only domestic, they could still sell international.
The problem was the shows were lasting 8 or more yrs, plus the 5yr window, best case they would get a once popular franchise in yr 14…so the value would be low, plus they needed content to fule streamer.
When both streamers bombed, they really didn’t want to spend money on content just because it was on cw, so they lowballed on the offers, plus international money dried up at se time.
Enter nexstar, that got the cw for free as long as they would take on debt load
Interesting but then what would WB have done with all the money from the ‘billion-dollar deal’ The CW’s Pedowitz made with Netflix just before Arrow was green lit?
Someday, somehow, Stephen Amell is gonna be in a room with the Nexstar president. On that day I hope Amell says to them, “You have failed this NETWORK.”
If it’s still alive he’ll be wrong, they would be the 1st ones to make it profitable as a network sense day 1. The network always lost money cbs and wb were making enough with syndication that they absorbed the loss 50/50. It’s interesting as former net let’s wb and upn were making money not alot but some
You are right on paper. Numbers don’t lie. But can’t you just let us fans have a little fun. I know they didn’t make money to justify keep going. But us fans miss the Arrowverse shows a lot. The CW was know for the Arrowverse. We feel just like Jeff’s comment that They “have failed this NETWORK” is because The CW with their cheap and pathetic way they are running this network now.
I loved Arrow, to bad it only lasted for 3 seasons. It then became a spinoff called Felicity and Friends for a couple of seasons. After that they had another spinoff called Olicity. The first 3 seasons were great and then the writers said screw the fans and started writing a show for themselves. They even killed off Black Canary to remove an obstacle in the way of their Olicity fan fiction. Smallville was a way better show, it found a way to please Lana and Lois fans. Black Canary dies 5 minutes after becoming a hero.
Black Canary was never an obstacle in the way of Olicity. They started planning them toward the end of season 1. Oliver proposed to Felicity right in front of Laurel and the town. The only obstacle was Laurel for herself and not knowing how to let go of someone who didn’t feel the same.
For those of us who loved Felicity from the moment her character was introduced, I beg to differ that the writers “screwed the fans”. I get that this outcome differed from the comics, but if anything the show writers were actually listening to the fans of the show (and you know responding to actual chemistry rather than forced chemistry), not just fans of the comic books.
They conformed to the loudest voices on Twitter – the death of many modern shows. As soon as you put shippers ahead of story, you’ve failed as a creator.
I stopped watching CW after it cancelled superheroes shows.
Ironic once Arrow ended the other shows slowly followed, Legends, Black Lightning, Flash went on longer than it should have, and picking up Supergirl was a mistake. I’m sure those will blame the pandemic or the showrunner decisions but the whole thing should have ended after crisis. This is what happens when you leave a franchise to decay.
Shame the CW is absolutely worthless now. Used to be home to some of the best TV for young adults (and older of course) and now theres nothing decent
What has arrow to do with saving the network lol 😂
Never been done before? I beg your pardon. Buffy and Angel did what Arrow did over a decade earlier. :o
The 2012 CW lineup was headlines by The Vampire Diaries, Supernatural, Gossip Girl, America’s Next Top Model. It’s not like the network didn’t have any hits before Arrow before came. Guggenheim cannot stop from writing fiction.
In an ideal world all the Arrowverse shows would have had a pre determined final season with some crossover potential. That way they could have and would have ended on a high.
So the Arrowverse saved the network that has now thrown it off to pasture.
Talk about biting the hand that fed you.
Smallville had it flaws but overall it was a much better show.
I didn’t like every Arrowverse show. I didn’t like every CW show. But there were plenty of Arrowverse and CW shows I did like and I miss them all greatly. The current management seems to at best want to be a cheaper copy of the Hallmark Channel and seems to have absolutely no programming strategy whatsoever. They’re basically throwing things at the wall to see what sticks and seem to be endlessly coming up with filler to fill the schedule in the hopes that something will click-seriously, why did they want the CW in the first place? They don’t seem to have the faintest idea what to do with it.
I hope that someday soon, some development occurs that will make fans of the Arrowverse and the real CW happy and let them feel they can stop mourning the losses they’ve had in the past couple of years (and, of course, fixes the problems that I did have with the Arrowverse and the real CW. In other words, what I’m hoping for is improved versions of both the Arrowverse and the real CW).