If Arrow Wasn’t A Hit, There Could Have Been No More CW

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.