CW’s The Flash: What Happened?

CW’s The Flash: What Happened?

Just a few days back, The Flash from the CW celebrated its 12th anniversary. Because of this, this has caused a lot of people to reflect on the show and look back on it 12 years later and more importantly, talk about the downfall of the show. I wanted to be a part of that and here are my thoughts on the show as a whole and why it had a downfall!

My Thoughts: If you could have guessed from my movie blog, I am a massive nerd of pop culture and superheroes. So naturally, whenever we get a new superhero tv show I am going to check it out. The Flash was no exception; I did not watch the pilot the night it premiered but I watched it that week. I watched The Flash before I even watched Arrow, so my introduction to the Arrowverse and Green Arrow was because of The Flash. Season 1 of The Flash is pretty fantastic; it is one of the best first seasons of television. They created this fun world, characters that you care about, and they had a compelling season long story arc with Reverse-Flash that tied into Barry’s origin story but there was also this mystery with Harrison Wells. On every single level, season 1 was a hit and was just a great season of television that is still rewatchable to this day. Season 2 is another great season that has another great villain with Zoom, and we get the multiverse introduced. At the time, the idea of doing a multiverse was fun because it had not been done before. Now, we are used to the multiverse through Marvel but back in 2015 when this season aired, we had not really seen the multiverse. It was another fun season that felt fresh because of what it had to offer. I will say this, season 2 was the last great season of The Flash, but season 4 was the last good season. Seasons 3 and 4 I think have a lot of issues and are big steps down, but they still have a lot of positives, and the charm of the first two seasons is there. For me, season 5 is really where the show started to go downhill and I started to get worried about the future of this show and it never recovered. Eric Wallace took over as the show runner in season 7 and that is really where the show just tanked for me. The first two seasons of The Flash are fantastic, two seasons are good, two are fine, and three are bad. With that perspective and that in mind, what exactly happened with The Flash and what led to its downfall?  

         REASON #1: 23 Episode Seasons: This is the big reason The Flash just went off the rails. They were running 23-episode long seasons for The Flash, seasons 1-5 all had 23 episodes. Seasons 6-9 did not have as many and that was due to COVID and the limitations of what they could do and how much they could film. Because of this, it meant they went through their best ideas at the beginning and as the show went along, they were having to scrap the bottom of the barrel for what to do with characters and what would make for “compelling” storylines. I praised season 1 for having a great season long story arc, but even in that there’s filler episodes. Most of the first half of the season is just freak of the week episodes with a lot of mystery with Harrison Wells. You cut from doing 23 episodes to doing 13 episodes and you have a tighter story, and you can carry those great ideas from season 1 into season 2 and so and so forth. As a point of reference, running parallel with this show was Netflix’s Daredevil, seasons 1-3 had 13 episodes each so by the end of season 3 you only had 39 episodes of the show. When The Flash reached its 39th episode, it was about 16 episodes into season 2. Why was Daredevil a great and better show? Because none of the seasons felt stretched out, they all felt like the perfect length.  

         REASON #2: Too Many TV Shows: The Arrowverse was something special as this DC shared universe on television. In several ways, the Arrowverse did a better job of a shared universe compared to the DCEU. I had a much easier time believing that Green Arrow and The Flash existed in the same universe compared to the DCEU which was just a mess. But because they had The Flash, Arrow, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, Batwoman, Black Lightning, and Superman and Lois all a part of this shared universe and each of them doing multiple seasons, it meant that that creative team for these shows were stretched out. You look at Greg Berlanti, who was the Kevin Feige of this universe and he eventually gets too stretched out so he cannot do a great job of shepherding this universe. But beyond that, as I said The Flash was doing these 23-episode long seasons, Arrow was also doing that exact same thing. The other ones did not have 23-episode long seasons, but they had 15-20 episodes, so they were also doing a lot of television and only one producer overseeing all of this, Berlanti who could not keep up. Why were the first two seasons of Arrow and The Flash fantastic? Because they were the only two tv shows, Berlanti was not stretched out as much. He could focus more on Arrow and The Flash and make those shows great. When you add more shows, you also must make sure that Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow are getting made and it is taking Berlanti’s attention away from Arrow and The Flash to make these other shows.  

         REASON #3: Team Flash: Yet again, this is another issue that a lot of the Arrowverse shows struggled with, especially Arrow. Both shows start off with a small group of people helping our hero, in the case of The Flash it is Barry, Cisco, Caitlyn, and Wells. But as the show goes along, the team gets bigger so now suddenly everybody is a member of Team Flash. Everybody gets superpowers so by the time you get to season 5, Caitlyn becomes Killer Frost and Cisco is now Vibe. What made Caitlyn and Cisco fun characters to begin with were they were the scientist and the tech expert who helped Barry back at the base. It is a classic quote from Syndrome in The Incredibles, “when everybody’s super, no one will be.” I think the worst example of this would be Iris, where season 1 before she learned Barry was The Flash she is great. Eventually she gets promoted to being the co-leader of the team and it makes no sense. In season 4, there is even a line where she says, “You’re not the Flash Barry, we are The Flash.” What? I do not even know what they were implying with that moment, but it does not make any sense, and it is a stupid line that is false. It does not make sense at all, and it goes back to this idea that everybody is now on the team when they do not need to be. Iris does not really need to be on the team besides being married to Barry. Sure, there is a journalism perspective she can provide but the show does not really lean into that as much as it should have. Even Barry’s identity starts to become a joke, where he wants to keep his secret hidden from as many people as long as possible. Iris does not learn about Barry’s secret until season 1 is done. But at a certain point, Barry starts revealing his secret to everybody sometimes in the first episode when these characters are introduced.  

         Reason #4: Eric Wallace: As previously stated, part of the reason for The Flash’s downfall was Eric Wallace taking over as the show runner. He took over starting in season 7 once they were able to resume production after COVID and the show never recovered. He did have a long history working on The Flash, but that does not make him a great show runner. Earlier when I mentioned that Barry’s identity starts to become a joke, it is because of him. When I say that he starts revealing his identity to everybody, it started in the later seasons when he was over it. The show got very talky where instead of Barry using his powers to stop the villain, he is talking them down and defeating them with kindness which is stupid. Because of filming during COVID there were budget limitations, whatever the reason is it created the show to not be good. Especially in season 9, half of the episodes Barry is not even in the suit. It makes no sense at all, Grant Gustin commented on that and shared the same frustrations as the audience. Wallace made some choices that brought the show down and it lost the magic of what made The Flash a great show to begin with. I am not surprised that season 9 was a bad final season because he did not do a great job with seasons 7 and 8 and even the show was going down in quality ever since season 5.