This is not a review of any particular episode but the series itself. The series is the best superhero television show I've ever seen. There's no contest for real. I couldn't make it through two seasons of Smallville; that's how bad I thought it was and it was on for ten seasons. Everything else I've watched was pure camp (The Incredible Hulk, the Adam West Batman, Wonder Woman) or just terrible (the short-lived Flash and Birds of Prey series). A lot of people apparently like Lois and Clark but I never saw it so I won't comment on it. And for reasons I'll explain later, I'm not including Agents of Shield in my comparison (I like that show a lot, for what it's worth). But anyway, back to Arrow. It works so well for a lot of reasons, but in my opinion the main one is continuity with the source material. To be short, there isn't much. And that's a good thing. Luckily for the show's creators, Green Arrow is not one of the all time iconic comic book/superhero characters. People who read them regularly know who he is, but to casual fans or nonreaders he is a complete unknown. That liberates the writers in a big way; they can pretty much take any character who wouldn't translate well from printed page to television screen and completely revamp them. A few examples are Count Vertigo, Black Canary, and Roy Harper.
In the comic, Vertigo is from a fictional foreign country and has a device attached to his head that emits a signal that makes people unbalanced. On the show he was a drug dealer/chemist who sold drugs that threw off people's balance. The former wold look ridiculous on a television show but the latter worked just fine. In the comics, Canary was a denizen of Gotham City whose super power was a super high pitched scream; she would eventually became Green Arrow's wife. On the show she is the sister of Oliver Queen's ex-girlfriend/true love who was stranded on the same island as Oliver and learned to fight there like he did. Her scream isn't a super power but the sound effect of a device she carries. And Roy Harper was a trained archer who was adopted by Oliver Queen and became his sidekick. On the show he's a teenager who dates Oliver's sister and gives him inside tips on what's happening on the streets. There's been some foreshadowing that he may be Oliver's sidekick one day, but that's it. These character differences would be an outrage if they were done on a Batman show or movie. Imagine the Joker as a drug dealing standup comedian or Catwoman as Batman's live in/lover and sidekick. Fans would hate it. What about a Superman show where Lois Lane was Superman's sister instead of his love interest? People would riot.
But Arrow can do this. Because the audience was not previously invested in any of the characters as they were depicted in the source material, the show's creators are free to change things to fit the show. If they were forced, by overly devoted fanboys, to keep Count Vertigo as he was in the comic it w ouldn't work well. But it should also serve as a notice to all the fanboys out there: fealty to the comic book isn't a vital part of making a good superhero movie or TV show. If Christopher Nolan stuck to the source material, Batman Begins might have ended with some of Ra's Al Ghul's minions pulling his dead body out of the wrecked subway train to haul off to a Lazarus Pit. In a 'realistic' story world like Nolan was going for that would have been ludicrous. Or if Bane had to shoot up on the venom every time he was about to fight Batman. So kudos to the team behind Arrow for knowing how to use the freedom they've been granted from the realtive obscurity of their main character.
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