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Spoilers DC TV Arrow/Flash Universe Crossover Discussion

That's not true. Each show has its own separate writing staff, all working under Berlanti and Schechter as the heads of the production company. Supergirl is run by Ali Adler & Andrew Kreisberg, The Flash by Aaron & Todd Helbing, Legends by Phil Klemmer, and Arrow by Wendy Mericle & Marc Guggenheim, and each set of showrunners has a different slate of staff writer-producers that they coordinate. Essentially the writing staffs are the "editorial teams" and Berlanti and Schechter are like the "executive editors" they all report to. They try to coordinate the best they can, and they actually do a surprisingly good job of it given how complicated the task is, but it's unfair and dismissive of their hard work to assume they're all a single staff and that coordinating the shows is easy. They just make it look easy, because they've spent years learning how to produce television and because they're really dedicated to tackling what's really a monumental challenge. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to make that challenge even harder with unnecessary complications.

Any idea when/why Berlanti stepped away from showrunning Supergirl (because he was doing so with Ali during Season 1)?
 
Any idea when/why Berlanti stepped away from showrunning Supergirl (because he was doing so with Ali during Season 1)?

Because he's got, like, a gajillion other shows to run, and I think he has a feature film in the works too. This is the life cycle of the successful TV producer. Eventually they reach the point where they're too busy running the production company to concentrate on just a single one of the shows they produce.
 
@Christopher That covers the 'why', but do we have a definitive timeline for when he made the decision to let Andrew take over his showrunning duties?

I'm not begrudging him for making this choice, mind you; I was just curious as to when/why it happened.
 
My understanding was that Adler and Kreisberg ran the show from the start. If Berlanti was relatively hands-on in the writing, he was probably supervising them in the same way Michael Piller supervised Jeri Taylor on late TNG and early Voyager.

A trick that generally works is to read the writers' credits. The showrunners usually write the season premieres and finales.
 
My understanding was that Adler and Kreisberg ran the show from the start.

Berlanti was initially announced as co-showrunner with Ali Adler and appeared/functioned in that capacity at Comic-Con and the TCAs.

If Berlanti was relatively hands-on in the writing, he was probably supervising them in the same way Michael Piller supervised Jeri Taylor on late TNG and early Voyager.

A trick that generally works is to read the writers' credits. The showrunners usually write the season premieres and finales.

In looking through the Season 1 credits, it looks as if Berlanti quietly handed co-showrunning duties to Andrew at some point during Season 1, which answers the 'when' part of my question.
 
So when is The Flash going to Riverdale?

Archie had a bunch of DC Rebirth posters in his room this week, in a product placement almost as blatant as the close-ups on Cover Girl makeup products they keep inserting. So if the Flash did go there, he'd find himself in a world where he was a fictional character -- although that's certainly not without precedent in the Flash's comics adventures.
 
People keep talking about how simple it would be the merge the worlds, and yeah the actual merging of the worlds would be simple, but trying the figure out what the merged world is like is where things get complicated. How much did the characters' histories change? How different is the world's history? Did the characters who weren't on the same Earth deal with each other before the shows? What is the relationship between Lexcorps and Queen Consolidated? What is the relationship between ARGUS and the DEO? There are thousands of questions like this that need to be answered and considered, and that is where things start getting incredibly complicated.
 
People keep talking about how simple it would be the merge the worlds, and yeah the actual merging of the worlds would be simple, but trying the figure out what the merged world is like is where things get complicated. How much did the characters' histories change? How different is the world's history? Did the characters who weren't on the same Earth deal with each other before the shows? What is the relationship between Lexcorps and Queen Consolidated? What is the relationship between ARGUS and the DEO? There are thousands of questions like this that need to be answered and considered, and that is where things start getting incredibly complicated.
Most of that could be handled with a line of dialog or simply just never mention the old continuity again.

FELICITY: Didn't LexCorp out bid Queen Consolidated for that contract?
OLIVER: Yes, but according my father, the Luthors used every dirty trick in the book to get it.
DIGGLE: And the tech is being used by ARGUS and the DEO to track down criminal Metas and aliens.
OLIVER: But now someone is using it to track our friends. Felicity reach out to Win at the DEO. Dig see what Lyla knows. We need to find out how that tech got into the wrong hands.
 
Still see no compelling reason for any merger. None. The dimension hopping portals require less effort than hailing a cab. And the entire DCTV universe is "small-universe" enough already--no need to make it even smaller. I have no doubt it can be done, I simply think it would be needlessly self-limiting and an unnecessary exercise. It certainly diminishes the storytelling potential of a multiverse.
 
Most of that could be handled with a line of dialog or simply just never mention the old continuity again.

It's easy to assume that something is simple when you're an armchair quarterback watching from the outside and don't actually have to do it. I have no doubt that if you were given the responsibility of actually making it work, you'd find it's a hell of a lot more complicated than you assume.
 
It's easy to assume that something is simple when you're an armchair quarterback watching from the outside and don't actually have to do it. I have no doubt that if you were given the responsibility of actually making it work, you'd find it's a hell of a lot more complicated than you assume.
I've seen it work in comics. It's usually hardcore fans who find it difficult to accept. I always think of fans who after Crisis and the Byrne reboot kept asking "When's the real Superman coming back?" or wanted to know if issue 225 was still in continuity.
 
I've seen it work in comics. It's usually hardcore fans who find it difficult to accept.

Except that, as I've pointed out before, Crisis ultimately didn't work. Or at least it didn't last. DC brought back the multiverse. They decided it was more interesting to have it after all. The advantage of doing an adaptation is that you can distill the stuff that works and don't have to repeat the mistakes of the original.
 
Except that, as I've pointed out before, Crisis ultimately didn't work. Or at least it didn't last. DC brought back the multiverse. They decided it was more interesting to have it after all. The advantage of doing an adaptation is that you can distill the stuff that works and don't have to repeat the mistakes of the original.
The post Crisis universe was around for several decades. From 1986 to 2011. Not a bad run.
Personally, I like a the Multiverse. It's what I grew with. But merging one isn't that hard if the creators stand firm.
 
The post Crisis universe was around for several decades. From 1986 to 2011.

And in that time, DC went through two more "Crisis" events - and an event called Zero Hour - to try and 'fix' the problems they'd created when they instituted the FIRST Crisis event and finally had things back to some semblance of simple normalcy, only to turn around and decide to abandon that continuity entirely and do yet another full-scale reboot, which is what gave us the New 52/Rebirth universe (and which is slowly starting to be merged with the post-Crisis universe as it existed pre-Flashpoint).

If the FIRST Crisis event had actually worked as intended, it wouldn't have taken DC so many additional 'tries' to come up with something that wasn't a narrative impediment and that didn't require so much 'hoop jumping' in order to keep straight, and they also wouldn't have felt the need to then turn around and almost immediately 'start from scratch' again.
 
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