Re: Would anyone watch a show in which Harvey Dent is the main charact
Sell it as the Breaking Bad of comic-based TV shows in terms of a seemingly good main character's gradual turn to the dark side. Before acid is thrown in his face, maybe Harvey has to deal with his mental illness (multiple personality disorder which he uses medication to keep suppressed) and bad memories of his abusive childhood caused by his alcholic father while fighting aganist crime through the legal system and with the help of his friend Bruce Wayne and Detective Jim Gordon. Maybe we give him a mother and a sister as family for him to interact with since his father would be dead or just absent from his life when the series opens.
If you're actually looking to sell the idea - who is your audience? Smallville has an audience precisely because of all the things comic book fans complain about, teen angst and freak of the week writing, that sets it smack in the middle of a lucrative demographic - teenagers.
Shows like Breaking Bad and the Sopranos have a much older demographic, and much as we might like to deny it, your average adult, who may be happy to go see a superhero movie, isn't nearly as likely to tune in weekly to a superhero tv show. This is not because Breaking Bad and the Sopranos are really any less fantastic than superheroes, but they are perceived as more straight genres - gangsters and drug dealers. Sensationalistic, but real parts of the contemporary world.
Where superheroes get tripped up is the costume. It's incredibly difficult to get past the ridiculousness of "costumed heroes" - even Smallville has danced around and around this, and ridiculousness is its coin in trade (well, that and beautiful 20 somethings). A guy in a bat costume pretty much automatically knocks out most adults' suspension of disbelief in the context of law or police procedural.
However, I've long thought that there was a cable show possiblity in a Gotham Central-ish type take on Batman (number one big stumbling block - see below). The thing is it would have to be significantly different from the comics -it would have to hinge on the moral question of vigilantism and the questions this throws to the cops and lawyers of Gotham City. Meaning the vigilante absolutely could not be regarded as a hero, either from inside or outside the narrative. At best, the main lawyer and cop characters might be able to take some pleasure in the vigilante's freedom to mete out harsh jsutice without worrying about things like rights and due process. References to the costume, probably including the name "Batman" would have to be kept to an absolute minimum and avoided completely if possible, 'cause, you know what? "Batman" is a goofy name/ title for anyone to go by. (number two big stumbling block - see further below)
#1 big stumbling block for such a take, especially if one added the requisite gratuitous sex and violence that makes HBO/ Showtime shows so much fun, is that Warner Bros would never give permission for a character they need to keep nominally safe for kids to be given such a treatment. And to be interesting at all to this hypothetical adult audience, you'd have to touch on things like incidental deaths caused by the vigilante's activities, property damage, violation of rights, public endangerment.
# 2 big stumbling block - avoiding all reference to the costume would beg the question of why this is attached to the Batman brand at all. The supposed tension of what's going to happen in the comics (Dent becoming Two-Face, etc) wouldn't really mean much to an adult audience, who doesn't care whether or not things end up as they are in the comics, much as Smallville's main audience doesn't care that Clark doesn't wear glasses and met everyone he was ever going to know in his life while he was in high school in a small town in Kansas.
That is, if you make it Batman, it's hard to make it so that an adult audience can swallow it. If you make it so an adult audience will dig it, it's hard to make it Batman.
So, what probably really needs to be pitched is a show focusing on a driven DA in a city where there's a clever vigilante who is a morally ambiguous villain. The DA can be as troubled as you like - abusive father, multiple personalities and all, in fact that probably makes a stronger pitch. But I don't think the vigilante can be Batman. Not to say you couldn't have a wealthy scion of an important family running about, being pals with the DA. But then Warner Bros would probably sue you.
It's problematical, as much as we might like to fantasize about it.
