“Batman: Caped Crusader Season One” Review

In terms of Batman cartoons, none surpass Batman: The Animated Series. It’s the gold standard for the bat-dressed superhero and no Batman cartoon before or after has managed to surpass the quality writing, animation, voices, and atmosphere. So when Warner Bros approached Bruce Timm to return to the animated series he had helmed, he wasn’t interested in rehashing. He did, however, start thinking about the ideas for Batman that were too adult for the Fox Kids timeslot. This led to Caped Crusader, a spiritual successor to The Animated Series that enhances the best aspects of Batman while looking and feeling like a much different show.

As with a lot of retooled Batman media, Caped Crusader goes back to basics for Batman. It even goes back in time by favoring a 1940s Gotham rather than a 40s-style Gotham. Bruce Wayne (Hamish Linklater) is just starting out as Batman, trying out the moonlighting vigilante lifestyle in a city of gangsters and corrupt cops. He becomes an essential force amid the various villains conspiring with crime boss Rupert Thorne (Cedric Yarbrough). Sometimes its goons in suits, sometimes its a corrupt cop like Bullock (John DiMaggio) and other times its themed baddies like The Penguin (Minnie Driver) or Firebug (Tom Kenny).

There’s a few people Batman can trust trying to work within the system. Commissioner Jim Gordon (Eric Morgan Stuart) continues to fight for justice even when it feels like his entire department is against him. His daughter, Barbara Gordon (Krystal Joy Brown), works as a public defender, unafraid to question the system that her dad is too lenient at times. Renee Montoya (Michelle C. Bonilla) is a detective who goes the extra mile for justice when corrupted cops like Bullock and Flass will not. With some help from Batman, they might be able to keep the city a little less dirty. Who knows? Maybe Barbara will someday become Batgirl. As for Alfred (Jason Watkins), he’s still the dedicated butler of Bruce, but still has enough insight to become more essential than a mere dispencery of dry barbs between Batman adventures.

Season one has an ongoing plot of District Attorney Harvey Dent (Diedrich Bader) descending from mayoral candidate to the villain Two Face. The race sometimes intersects with the police trying to catch Batman and Batman trying to catch corruption with its pants down. There’s a decent mixture of the villain-of-the-week format from the original show and more of a serialized noir tale built for primetime. The grittier format works for leaning more into the darkness of Batman’s classic crime-fighting exploits, where Harvey’s turning against the mafia leads to plenty of murder and uncomfortable questioning of a bought-and-paid-for justice system. That said, the show doesn’t shy away from the more supernatural villains like Gentlemen Ghost (Toby Stephens) or Nocturna (Mckenna Grace), who are thankfully not given a Scooby-Doo style explanation for their powers.

Timm’s retro Batman contains some refreshing revisions that feels very much in line with trying to expand DC Comics properties rather than lock them in a box. While he was developing the Justice League cartoon, Timm remarked that he wanted to mix up the ensemble so that it wasn’t just a bunch of white guys saving the day every week. This is very much the case with how he retools in Caped Crusader. Montoya was an original creation of The Animated Series and this version reworks her into a more engrossing character, where her bigger frame and romantic interest in women make her more distinct in a sea of suit-wearing detectives. Jim and Barbara are black, echoing the recent Batman adaptation by Matt Reeves (one of many executive producers on this show as well). The Penguin swaps genders for more of a mob boss mommy who gets vicious with her sons when she suspects one of them is ratting her out to the cops.

The premise is solid, but there are some questionable choices in how characters are framed. A woman as The Penguin is not a bad idea, but surely there’s a better name than the unoriginal Oswalda. There’s also a rushed aspect to how the villains are framed, where most only get to occupy a single episode. This leads to characters like The Penguin and Catwoman having compelling aspects, but quickly resolving their capers. Even the few villains that do get a few episodes to develop, as with Harley Quinn (Jamie Chung), seem to mash in too much in a short time. Harley is made interesting for her torturing of tycoons and her romance with Montoya, but it all arrives abruptly. This doesn’t become a huge hinderance, but it does highlight how a show like this could use more episodes so that its cavalcade of villains feels more progressive than aggressive, as though the show needs to it a quota for villains per season.

Caped Crusader embodies the best aspects of Bruce Timm’s Batman while still feeling like a refreshing take for a 1940s revision. There are some issues with pacing, and some characters could use more development than others, especially Batman, who still feels like more of a vessel than a compelling figure in this crime saga. The freedom that Timm has been granted with this show, boosting from a TV-Y7 to TV-14 territory, does make this version of Batman feel more enticing with the 1940s aesthetic, the moody orchestral soundtrack by Frederik Wiedmann, and the scripts astute of how to use best Batman’s lore (especially with comics author Ed Brubaker as head writer). The show rarely bores and there’s so much left to explore, where Batman’s vault of villains becomes more exciting not for how they could be retooled for a modern setting but reshaped for a 1940s vibe. It’s a Batman cartoon that fully embraces that classic detective tone and serves as a firm reminder of how long-time Batman creatives like Timm and Brubaker have more than the same old stories to tell.