Superhero Media: Arrow - Season 1

I saw the DVD set of the first season of Arrow going cheap in my local supermarket and thought it couldn't hurt to pick it up. Billionaire playboy, Oliver Queen, is marooned on an island and forced to fend for himself for five years. When finally rescued, Oliver returns to Starling City and vows to clean up the corrupt by donning a green hoodie and loosing arrows into them. For those familiar with Green Arrow, Arrow is weirdly off the mark, paying homage to the mythos whilst tarting it up for TV and trying to cram as much Batman in there as it can. Add in a possibly-mystical conspiracy to blow up part of the city and a plethora of improbably-hot secondary characters and Arrow comes across way more prime-time than cape and cowl. At least at first. 

Over the course of the first season, Arrow is slowly metamorphosing from "Oliver Queen kills people and hates wearing shirts" to an actual vigilante hero; building a cadre of loyal helpers, getting recurring villains and even developing a stringent moral code. There's still plenty of shirtless brooding and soap opera to keep the ladies interested, but problems between characters are actually resolved, to the point where season one ties up 90% of the loose ends it started with, clearing the decks for a new story come season two. The action and fight scenes are well done, excepting Oliver's habit of hitting people with his bow rather than his fists. 

Unlike many Australians, I don't pirate television, so I have little-to-no idea what happens in later seasons of Arrow or The Flash, but season one of Arrow was compelling enough for me to seek out the above just to see what happens. As I said above, it's a very prime-time take on the character, possibly not to the tastes of those who have grown up with a green-clad and bearded Oliver espousing Socialism and slagging off his comrades in the JLA; that said, Arrow is fun to watch and it's nice to see superheroes on television outside of cartoons.