I finally got around to seeing the first episode of the new Arrow series on the CW. This is the Green Arrow’s first solo television series, starting with a late 20s/early 30s Oliver Queen returning to his home of Starling City after being shipwrecked for the last five years.
Oliver was on the family yacht which sunk in a typhoon, possibly with some foul play hinted at.
The Oliver that everyone remembers has now been replaced by a darker brooding one, who has returned home to save a city that has become increasingly more corrupt. He has sworn to his father–who killed himself to allow his son to survive–that he will do everything in his power to fix the city. The older Queen told his son about all of the corrupt business men and government officials that he had the displeasure of dealing with.
But just as Ollie is found to be different, he finds his circle of family and friends to have changed as well. His mother Moira (played by Susanna Thompson, an actress who looks and sounds eerily like Jan from the Office) has remarried one of his father’s business partners, as well as plotting to abduct her son to find out what his father told him. His younger sister is a coke head party girl.
The pilot has Oliver going out on his first mission as a vigilante, targeting a Bernie Madoff-type white-collar criminal who has bilked millions of dollars out of the common folk of Starling City. To complicate things, Oliver is being chased by a police detective who happens to not only be the father of his ex-girlfriend Laurel (who seems to be a stand-in for Dinah Lance, better known as Black Canary) but of his other daughter who died during the yacht accident. To make that clear, Oliver was cheating on his longtime girlfriend with her sister (who died on his yacht) and is now being chased by their father when he goes out as a bow-and-arrow toting vigilante.
The resulting show is a lot of fun, with all the characters intertwined on multiple levels. The only problem is that they haven’t made Oliver all that likable yet and why he has undertaken such a public crusade still isn’t clear. It’s also not really explained how he has become such a bad ass archer and street fighter as well.
On the whole, it’s a pretty interesting concept and I can only assume my questions will be answered as the series progresses. Stephen Amell is believable in this role, which is more inline with the New 52 version of the character or even Connor Hawke than the traditional Green Arrow. The show works on the whole and is worth checking out future episodes. I’m already much more interested in it than I was with Smallville.
Ridiculously Awesome 
Lemire will write Green Arrow from the 17th issue on. He promised a return to classic GA believing that this would help bring back disillusioned fans back to the character. This is exactly what the character needed: a good writer recreating him from head to toe, and giving us back the old Oliver we used to love.
I complained about the New 52 version of Green Arrow on every blog I could find, and all the other fans of the character were unsatisfied as well, so I knew that DC couldn’t ignore us forever, and was going to making him mature once again.
Also, notice that Lemire will go on working with a penciller having a creepy style: after Foreman and Pugh, we’ll see him teaming up with Sorrentino. This is a good thing, because creepy art perfectly ties with his delightfully weird style of writing.
I remember you didn’t enjoy Animal Man very much, so probably you’re not excited about Lemire working on Green Arrow as I am. Will you give him a second chance?
I’ll probably keep reading Green Arrow with Lemire on board, as long as it doesn’t veer too much into the horror side. I just find it funny that I like the Arrow version of the character so much more than the New 52 version. I guess it’s cause in the show he has a much better supporting cast.
You’re not the first one complaining about the insubstantiality of Green Arrow’s supporting cast (http://threatquality.com/2012/09/10/dc-comics-reviews-green-arrow-wonder-woman/).
I think that DC put Lemire on Green Arrow too late: by February, a lot of people who enjoyed the tv series will have already given a look at the comic book. And most of them won’t give it a second chance when Lemire starts working on it, simply because most of them don’t know that a different writer is coming on it. Thank you for your reply! : )