8 November 2013 | A_Different_Drummer

8 | Great show ... if not for the Flashbacks from Hell

Let's take a moment of mourning for the TV plot arcs of yore. Back when shows prioritized the characterizations above the action and, if indeed there was action, it took place precisely in the last 7 minutes of the episode, and was all done with before the close, giving the characters a chance to make light comic banter, close down the storyline, and give the audience a chance to go to the toilet. How many TV shows followed that formula I cannot say, but the number was in the 100s. Now all that has changed. You can now have action many times in the body of a show, it is permitted, even encouraged. And you have action even before the characterizations are fully developed. All this is positive evolution I think. But here the catch. There are no more "closed" story-lines. In the multi-band, multi-channel, multi-device electronic age, where viewers tend to have attention span of a hummingbird, nighttime TV has astonishingly borrowed the Rule Book of daytime soap operas and, lo!, plots never actually resolve, they just become more complex. ARROW is one of the best exponents of the new type of comic-book-derived drama, arguably as good as or even better than SMALLVILLE (which was, thematically, all over the map). Amell is great. He has a whispery kind of delivery which oddly makes what he says that much more interesting. The supporting cast is great. In fact the only thing that prevented me from giving this a "10" are the flashbacks. They are terrible. They are like some silent Hell the viewers must go through to get back to the actual episodes. It is almost as if the lead writer, as a small child, was locked in a closet with a DVD looping KUNG FU, and grew up to believe that you cannot advance 10 minutes of plot in the present, without 2 minutes of flashback to fortify it.