As I mentioned in a post last year, I don’t think “realistic” is necessarily the best standard for judging fiction (I should add an exception for anything which presents itself as a realistic look at the courts, married life, war, etc.). And that when I vote down something for being unrealistic it’s usually because I didn’t like the story anyway. A couple more examples—
Superman Family was the series the Jimmy Olsen comic turned into in 1974, when surveys indicated the Superman tie was more important for Jimmy, Lois Lane and Supergirl than anything else. All three of their books were canceled for a super-size anthology series, which ran until this final issue in 1982 (cover by Gil Kane). Midway through the run, Linda (Supergirl) Danvers went from being a guidance counselor at a school for the gifted to appearing in a soap (not that crazy a change—she studied drama in college in the early 1970s—but it still reflects the way DC was constantly soft-rebooting its female stars). In this issue she finally gets fed up with the constant demands on her time and goes back to college in another soft reboot) (psychology major this time).
The thing I found realistic is that she treated acting like pretty much any other job. I did community theater for years, and I think acting is much more than that. So do lots of actors whose interviews I’ve read over the years. Not all, certainly; for some it’s just a job, or something they stumbled into or got pressured into and couldn’t seem to get out of. But this is Supergirl; I doubt that’s the case with her.
Yet we never see any emotional connection to the acting. Not frustration she’s on a soap, rather than serious theater, not enjoying that she’s playing a soap opera vixen, it’s never presented as anything but an annoying distraction from super-heroing.
But of course, that’s been true of super-heroes for years. Barry (Flash) Allen did almost no police work in the Silver Age; Matt Murdock’s law career was mostly a set-up for adventures. Clark Kent’s TV newsman career (from late sixties through the John Byrne reboot) just made it slightly more complicated for him to juggle his job and crimefighting. It’s only because it’s acting and I care about acting that Linda’s lack of interest in the job (and by extension the writer’s).
For the second example, we have Gotham. This is the weakest of the current crop of comics-based series, an awkward hybrid of cop show and super-heroics set in the years before Batman appeared (the Waynes have just been assassinated). This show isn’t working for me: showing characters who will someday be part of the Bat-mythos doesn’t automatically (or usually) make them interesting.
But the point that I’m writing about today is the relationship between Jim Gordon and his wife Barbara, a reporter. She’s constantly demanding to know everything he’s doing, so that she can share the burden. His refusal to tell her everything she treats as a flaw in the relationship … despite the fact that in one of the early episodes, he did tell her something confidentially and she reported it.
Speaking as a reporter, I find this hard to swallow. If I were dating or hanging out with someone from city hall back when I covered Destin, anything they told me away from the office would have to be off-limits. Among friends I’ve had who have vented about confidential stuff, it’s usually prefaced with “You are not to tell anyone this!” Certainly if I did treat their secrets as fuel for a story, I couldn’t then turn around and complain that they don’t share their feelings.
But I wouldn’t hold this up as proof of Gotham’s fatal flaw. It annoys me, but only because I already don’t care about show.
