Arrowverse showrunner Marc Guggenheim recently visited Andy Behbakht’s Showrunner Whisperer podcast and talked about the pressures of creating Arrow for the network — and some of that pressure might have been bigger than everyone knew at the time: In short, if Arrow was not a hit, The CW could have ceased to exist.
“Shortly after the pilot got ordered to series, [WB head] Peter Roth 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,” Guggenheim revealed. 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.”
He also spoke of other hurdles of launching the show – one being co-showrunning with Andrew Kreisberg, and the other being the fact that Arrow was trying to do a superhero show in a way that had never been done before.
“The the closest [comparison] especially in terms of the time was Smallville, but Arrow was nothing like Smallville. It was much grittier. It was much darker. It had a lot more action, and the type of action was very stunts-heavy. It also had this what I would sort of describe as a Nolanesque verisimilitude. That made it challenging,” Guggenheim said, pointing to discussions of how they would hide Oliver Queen’s secret identity without a mask, and how characters like Laurel would not realize it was him.
There are a lot of great stories in Guggenheim’s discussion, so if you want to check it out, zipline here to give it a full listen, or watch the embedded video below.
Craig Byrne
Craig Byrne has been writing about TV on the internet since 1995. He is also the author of several published books, including Smallville: The Visual Guide and the show's Official Companions for Seasons 4-7.
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