Tag shows you should be watching

Swamp Thing (2019)

One perfect season. A CDC investigator (Crystal Reed) returns to the Louisiana marshes where a biology experiment has gone wrong, and a dead man comes back as something older and greener than either of them. DC’s horror entry gives the…

Gotham

The city before the bat: Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie) joins a police department that is itself the biggest criminal organization in town, and the show asks what Gotham was like while Bruce Wayne was still a kid with a broken…

Superman & Lois

The best Superman story in decades is not about saving the world, it is about raising two boys in a small farming town. Clark Kent and Lois Lane move their twin sons back to Smallville, and the show spends real…

Batwoman

A Batman-less Gotham, a stolen suit, and a production that never found its footing. Batwoman had genuine ingredients: Ruby Rose’s Kate Kane, a solid Alice as villain, and a city worth exploring. What it did with them is another matter.…

DC’s Legends of Tomorrow

The Arrowverse’s B and C listers steal a timeship and the show becomes the best thing in the franchise. Legends of Tomorrow starts as a questionable heist crew of side characters and mutates, season by season, into the funniest, weirdest,…

Supergirl

Superman’s cousin gets her own show and immediately has to prove she is not a footnote. Melissa Benoist’s Kara Zor-El is sunny where Oliver is brooding, and the show’s optimism is the point: hope as a choice, not naivety. Season…

Black Lightning

Jefferson Pierce retired the suit years ago. He is a high school principal now, and the show treats that as the superpower: this is a CW drama about a community, police violence, and what a Black hero owes his neighborhood,…

The Flash

Barry Allen gets struck by lightning and wakes up with superspeed, and the Arrowverse gets its heart. Grant Gustin’s Barry is the friendliest forensic scientist in television history, and the show runs on that warmth even when the plot is…

Arrow

The show that built an entire universe out of a billionaire on a salmon ladder. Oliver Queen returns from five years on a hellish island with a list of names and a bow, and Stephen Amell spent eight seasons doing…

Smallville

No flights, no tights: ten years of Clark Kent growing up in Kansas before he ever earns the cape. Smallville turned the world’s most familiar origin story into a teen drama with a Kryptonite engine, meteor freaks of the week…