Marc Guggenheim Promises “A Lighter Tone” For Arrow Season 4

Arrow Season 3 went pretty dark places. There were some deaths, and some of them didn’t stick… at this point, we’re pretty sure Akio’s the only one who’ll really stay dead… even the lead character got stabbed with a sword. So when IO9 interviewed Executive Producer Marc Guggenheim and he was asked what we can expect from Season 4, what did he say?

“It will take a lighter tone. That’s pretty much the only thing I say without spoiling it,” he told the site.

“We’ve been working for about a month now in the writers’ room, talking about season 4, and I think that one thing we all collectively understood was season 3 beginning with Sara’s death, because it’s the death of a major character on the show, it set a tone for the remainder of the season. And I’m not the least bit apologetic for that tone,” Guggenheim said. “I happen to like dark and I like the fact that Arrow is a pretty dark show particularly for a network show. That said, every year you want to mix things up and there was sort of a collective desire on all of our parts to try to inject a little bit more lightness into the show, a little bit more humor. It’s not going to radically change. The show’s still going to be the show but in terms of tone we’re coming off a very very hard season for all of our characters. We wanted to try to mix it up a little bit,” he said.

Guggenheim also talked about the criticisms comparing Arrow to Batman, especially when it came to the Ra’s al Ghul storyline.

“It’s funny. Certainly a lot of people have found parallels to both Batman Begins and also to Ra’s al Ghul and the comics as he’s been portrayed. I think to a certain extent it comes with the territory of telling a story with the League of Assassins and Nanda Parbat and Ra’s al Ghul,” Guggenheim said. “One thing I often say, for us the difference between Batman and Arrow, the difference between our version of Oliver Queen and Bruce Wayne is that Bruce Wayne tends to make the right decisions. You can’t really point to too many instances where Bruce Wayne’s been on the wrong side of a judgment call whereas I think Oliver makes a lot of bad choices. Oftentimes I joke in the writers’ room that Oliver’s bad choices are part of the currency of the show,” he continued.

“There’s a reason why the show is called Arrow and not Green Arrow. And he is in constant evolution and part of being in constant evolution and needing to grow both as a hero and as a human being is the fact that he doesn’t always make the right choices. Or at the very least he makes choices that feel right to him but don’t feel right to other people. And I think that’s something we definitely see in play in the final episode of season 3 whereas Bruce Wayne, y’know, he usually gets it right. To me that’s the key difference,” Guggenheim explained.

You can read Marc Guggenheim’s full interview on IO9. The interview also includes some Legends of Tomorrow talk and some discussion about his new comic book series, so check it out!