Before Arrow Launched The Arrowverse, Turns Out Stephen Amell's Show Was Crucial To The CW's Survival
While Arrow wasn’t the first DC TV show to air on The CW, with that honor belonging to Smallville since it was part of the opening programming block following The WB and UPN merging into one network, there’s no question that the Stephen Amell-led series was a big deal for the channel. The adventures of Oliver Queen paved the way for spinoffs like The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow and Batwoman that all came together to form the Arrowverse. However, it turns out that even before this shared continuity came into existence, Arrow was already crucial to The CW’s survival.
Arrow co-creator Marc Guggenheim appeared on The Showrunner Whisperer to speak with host Andy Behbakht about his career, including the origins of Arrow, which premiered in 2012, six years after The CW launched. When asked what hurdles he had to overcome in Season 1, the executive producer revealed:
Shortly after the pilot got ordered to series, Peter Roth [then-chairman and CEO of Warner Bros. Television Studios] took us out to lunch and basically laid out for us, in incredible detail, the reality that if Arrow wasn’t a hit, there would be no more CW. So it was the pressure of having a show and keeping the show on the air, that’s one thing, but now we also have the pressure of keeping the whole network on the air. That’s another thing.
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Wow, talk about high expectations right out of the gate! When Arrow first hit the airwaves, The CW’s other shows included Gossip Girl, 90210, Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries, all of which certainly had sizable fanbases, and Smallville had concluded its 10-season run the year prior. But evidently things were dire enough at The CW that if Arrow hadn’t grabbed viewers immediately with the Emerald Archer’s adventures in then-Starling City, the network would have simply collapsed.
Fortunately, that didn’t end up happening. While Arrow handled the Green Arrow mythology with a darker tone compared to much of its comic book source material, with Marc Guggenheim and the rest of the creative team taking inspiration from Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, the show proved popular enough to warrant The CW ordering a second season. In the end, Arrow ran for eight seasons (though it was originally designed to only last five seasons), and the Arroweverse as a whole became one of The CW’s biggest draws of the 2010s. So yeah, it’s be an understatement to say that Arrow fulfilled Peter Roth’s wish of it being a “hit.”
If you’re now in the mood to revisit Arrow, it can be streamed with a Netflix subscription. Otherwise, use our 2024 TV schedule to keep track of what’s currently airing/streaming, and remember that plenty of other DC programming is available to watch if you have a Max subscription.
