Keeping up with the various live-action, DC Comics-based TV series on the air is becoming a full-time job, and it's only going to become more difficult in 2018. This week, DC revealed a new digital streaming service that will feature, among other things, a live-action Titans series overseen by Akiva Goldsman, Greg Berlanti, Geoff Johns and Sarah Schechter. Combine that with the host of DC shows on The CW as well as Gotham, Lucifer and Syfy's upcoming Krypton series, and there's barely a corner of the DCU that isn't being explored on TV these days.

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The Titans announcement is intriguing for a number of reasons, not least of which being it comes just a couple months after we learned that WB is adding a live-action Nightwing movie to the DC Extended Universe . With Titans also centering around Dick Grayson, it's enough to wonder if the two projects are directly connected. Could Titans actually be a prequel or companion to the Nightwing movie, thereby making it the first TV project set in the DCEU?It's easy to see how Titans could work to enrich the DCEU. Batman v Superman introduced a much older version Caped Crusader, one who had been through at least one Robin and experienced years of adventures and misfortunes that were only hinted at in the film itself. The Titans show could be set during that lost era of the DCEU. Even if Batman himself never actually shows up, the series could shed light on a younger Dick Grayson and his relationship with his mentor. If Titans does actually focus on Dick's career as Robin rather than Nightwing, the show doesn't even necessarily have to worry about casting the same actor. It can simply work as a standalone, flashback-oriented superhero series that adds depth and color to the present-day DCEU.And let's face it - the DCEU could really benefit from some of the levity and fun that shows like Flash and Legends of Tomorrow bring to the table. Regardless of when the Titans series takes place, the best thing it could do as a DCEU tie-in is help to transition the universe away from the darkness that's defined films like Batman v Superman and Man of Steel.All of this assumes that Titans is directly connected to the DCEU. It's certainly possible given Geoff Johns' new status as head of DC Films, but it still seems unlikely at this point. Nor is it likely, despite Berlanti's involvement, that Titans will be set in the same world as The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, Constantine and Arrow. Arrow may have featured the occasional Batman villain like Harley Quinn and Ra's al Ghul, but it's given no sign that Batman and his allies actually exist in this world. At this point, it would be a bit of a stretch to suddenly claim otherwise.Most likely, Titans will be set in its own, separate universe. But we'd hope there's nothing preventing Berlanti, Johns and the rest from introducing Titans as a piece of the same multiverse that links the Flash/Arrow universe with Supergirl. If Berlanti was able to move forward with a Flash/Supergirl crossover even when the two shows aired on different networks, why couldn't the same happen with Titans? We don't need to see Dick Grayson, Starfire and Raven bumping elbows with Barry Allen or Oliver Queen every week, but the occasional inter-dimensional crossover would certainly be welcome. Just imagine how much cooler The CW's next Invasion-style crossover would be with the Titans joining the fray.Titans could wind up being the show that solidifies DC's live-action multiverse. The Flash already teased that the scope of the Arrow-verse is much bigger than the handful of Earths we normally see in these shows (Flash and Arrow's Earth-1, Earth-2, Supergirl's Earth-38, etc.). One of Barry's trips into the Speed Force indicated that the 1990 Flash TV series also exists in this multiverse.Why stop there? Why not establish that all of DC's live-action movies and TV series are part of one massive multiverse? Why can't Smallville and the Tim Burton Batman movies and the Richard Donner Superman movies and even the current DCEU also exist as part of this cosmic superstructure? Maybe we'll never see all of these heroes cross paths, but it would be enough to know that the potential for some truly off-the-wall crossovers is there. And it would allow for characters like Tom Welling's Superman to return to the air, if only for a brief hour or two.At the very least, this announcement is the latest sign that DC and WB are a little more relaxed nowadays about allowing multiple versions of the same character to exist at once. We have two very different versions of the Flash thanks to Grant Gustin and Ezra Miller. Syfy's Krypton and The CW's Supergirl are about to co-exist on the air. And with Dick Grayson headlining Titans, there may be two different versions of Nightwing debuting in the live-action realm. Hopefully DC has realized that, rather than confusing superhero fans, these different versions only serve to make the DC multiverse a more varied and interesting place. Every fan has their favorites, and treating all of these projects as pieces of a massive, shared multiverse means that no one version is more valid than another.

Jesse is a mild-mannered writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter , or Kicksplode on MyIGN