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Legends Of Tomorrow Will Have Standalone Seasons A La True Detective

By Nick Tylwalk

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Super hero TV, at least as we know it right now, tells stories pretty close to the way we experience them in ongoing comic book series. There are season-long arcs on Arrow and The Flash, for instance, which make them somewhat self-contained, but those are only building blocks for larger, more encompassing sagas. Just don’t expect DC’s Legends of Tomorrow to be like that when it debuts in 2016.

Bucking the trend established by its fellow DC shows on The CW, Legends of Tomorrow is going to be an anthology series, according to the men behind it. Showrunner Phil Klemmer and executive producer Marc Guggenheim recently explained this idea to Screen Rant, which each of them name-dropping a popular series currently on TV to explain their vision.

Here’s Klemmer comparing it to a certain HBO series that isn’t quite as popular in its sophomore season as it was the first time around:

"It’s an anthology show. This is not designed to go forever. This season is meant to be standalone … I mean not as anthological as ‘True Detective.’ But not everybody will be continuing on this journey. The sort of central premise of time travel and Vandal Savage is totally up for grabs. This is meant to be a season that is tightly serialized that, when it’s over, you can’t go home again."

Guggenheim chose a series from a different network that has been doing the anthology thing even longer:

"The way we think of it is each arc, each season is its own separate movie. What we want to do is have each separate movie have its own identity. So almost to the point where each season was telling one big story that you could sort of subtitle, like the way you do subtitle ‘American Horror Story,’ if that makes sense."

That makes perfect sense, actually. The difference between Legends of Tomorrow and both True Detective and American Horror Story, though, is that we can reasonably expect that some of the characters who come back for Season 2 will be the same. Rip Hunter would be my top, completely uneducated guess, simply because his time-traveling abilities would be needed to keep the core concept going. That also explains how the Flash’s two Rogues, Captain Cold and Heat Wave, are probably only going to be borrowed for a season before returning to torment the Fastest Man Alive down the road.

The most exciting part of the anthology concept is that it will allow the Legends team to continue to expand the DC TV universe and add more characters with each new season. I think we can all agree that’s an exciting prospect indeed.

(via Screen Rant by way of Comic Book Resources)

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