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The Batman: Joe Barton Shares Thoughts on Scrapped Gotham PD Series

Published Wed, 26 Oct 2022 13:38:12 -0500

As of yesterday, we can officially say that there's movement on both spinoffs stemming from Matt Reeves' The Batman (with more planned, apparently). First, the Colin Farrell-starring Penguin spinoff has Lauren LeFranc aboard as writer & showrunner, and Emmy Award-winning director Craig Zobel (Mare of Easttown) set to direct two episodes and executive produce the HBO Max series. And then we have Farrell having nothing but good things to say about how the project is progressing, so things are looking promising. And then, on Tuesday, we learned that Antonio Campos (HBO's The Staircase) had boarded the Arkham Asylum-focused spinoff as its new writer and director, serving as showrunner & executive producer should the project get a series green light. But this time around, we're looking at what might've been, with Joe Barton (The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself) sharing his thoughts on the scrapped "Gotham P.D." series (which "Arkham Asylum" would replace.

"Like, was it a bullet dodged? I don't know. I really don't know. It's difficult. I mean, it does seem pretty chaotic. But then it was pretty chaotic when I was doing my thing there, so in a way, I didn't get to avoid the chaos. I think we were slightly the first wave of that chaos," Barton explained during an interview with Variety when asked if the series being passed on wasn't a good thing considering what's been happening with Warner Bros. Discovery & DC (prior to James Gunn & Peter Safran being named the co-heads of DC Studios). "I think the [Discovery merger] happened about halfway through the process, which had already been really, really rocky."

Barton continued, "I think it would have been really great, and that's kind of why I feel gutted about it, just because I know we would have made a great show. And so that'll always be, for me, a regret because I just think it would have been really super cool. But it just wasn't to be. And I do think probably the process of making it would have been challenging. If the development of it is anything to go by, the actual fucking making of it, I think, would have been – yeah, fucking intense probably. So in that respect, I'm kind of glad. It was definitely stressful. It was a really stressful period, and I was working on it for a year, but I was doing it at the same time as this ['The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself'], 'The Lazarus Project,' and a few other bits. It was slightly mad. But yeah, I guess I will always regret the show that we could have made, but I think I'll probably live longer without the stress it would have caused."

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