Gotham executive producer Bruno Heller (Rome, The Mentalist) was at the TCA (Television Critics Association) press tour today, where he answered some questions about the show's early incarnations of some of Batman's most iconic villains.

Clare Foley as Ivy Pepper in Gotham.

There was a recent report that every episode of Gotham would introduce a person who could potentially turn out to be the Joker. Heller clarified that they did want to tease Joker, among others, but that it wasn't quite as extreme as we'd heard.Said Heller, "We will be playing with… Not just with Joker. Half the fun with all of these characters is who is going to turn into what and when? Certainly the Joker is a good example. In the pilot, you see there’s a comedian there. People immediately leap… And that’s really letting the audience do our work for us. Because I haven’t said anything about that guy and people go there!"Heller elaborated, "Yeah, we’ll play with that down the line. Not over the course of one season, no, because people will still get tired of that. 'Is that the Joker? Is that the Joker?' No. In a subtle way, we’ll be doing that and hopefully we’ll fool them in the end."Comic book fans have expressed frustration that while every other Batman character has the same name we know from the comics, Poison Ivy stands out because she is named Ivy Pepper, not Pamela Isley. I asked Heller why that is and he gave me an answer he cautioned did delve into"It’s really about being able to tell the secret histories of these stories. If you just re-tell stories exactly as they’ve been told before, whilst you’re being true to the created mythology, you’re not really adding anything to it. So you have to find ways of finding more. And in this case, we’ve set up a situation in which Ivy Pepper, her mom is sick, her dad is dead… She’s going to go to the orphanage. And she’s a nice young girl; relatively undamaged. And she will find people to adopt her. And then we will start on the Poison Ivy story that people are familiar with."While Heller didn't elaborate from there, there's some pretty obvious guesses one could make about Ivy Pepper's name possibly being changed by her new adoptive parents... and then her eventually reclaiming the name Ivy down the line in a dramatic manner.Gotham debuts September 22nd on FOX.