Things got pretty dire for the characters on The Flash in the show’s recently-concluded third season — but when they return in the fall, showrunner Todd Helbing promises there will be less dour, dire episodes and a bit more of the fun that helped separate the series from the prevailing aesthetic of superhero shows at the time of its launch.
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After Barry returns from the Speed Force, what seems like six months to everyone else will have been an eternity to him — and while that experience was enough to throw Jay Garrick into desperation and drive Savitar evil, Barry comes out of it changed in a different and more positive way.
“Last year, once we showed Iris die in the future, to keep up that doom and gloom, it becomes a burden, and not just on us writing-wise, on the show and it just sort of had this pall over the season that I think we didn’t expect to be so heavy,” Helbing told ComicBook.com. “I’m not trying to say anything bad about season 3. I love season 3, and I love Savitar, and I love the story we told, but I think that’s about as dark as I ever want to go with the show. So yeah, I think that was a conscious effort of ours to really go back to everybody enjoyed being on this team and with each other, and make The Flash have fun again. I’m really excited about the scripts so far; they’re really, really funny.”
“It’s almost like a fresh start for me as an actor this year,” Grant Gustin added in a separate interview at Comic Con. “The first episode is called ‘Reborn,’ and it’s our take on Rebirth. It gives me an opportunity to let go of all the weight that we’ve kind of built up for the first three seasons and have held onto. There’s even some lines that reflect that for Barry — that he’s been able to cope and move on in a way that he never was able to in the past. So it gives me an opportunity to let go and have more of that fun that we had initially in season one.”
Fans will get to see more of the new, improved The Flash when the hit series debuts in October on The CW.
Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) lived a normal life as a perpetually tardy C.S.I. in the Central City Police Department. Barry’s life changed forever when the S.T.A.R. Labs Particle Accelerator exploded, creating a dark-matter lightning storm that struck Barry, bestowing him with super-speed and making him the fastest man alive — The Flash. But when Barry used his extraordinary abilities to travel back in time and save his mother’s life, he inadvertently created an alternate timeline known as Flashpoint; a phenomenon that gave birth to the villainous speed god known as Savitar, and changed the lives of Caitlin Snow (Danielle Panabaker) and Wally West (Keiyan Lonsdale) forever.
With the help of his adoptive father, Joe West (Jesse L. Martin), his lifelong best friend and love interest Iris West (Candice Patton), and his friends at S.T.A.R. Labs — Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes), C.S.I Julian Albert (Tom Felton), and an Earth-19 novelist named H.R. Wells (Tom Cavanaugh) — Barry continues to protect the people of Central City from the meta-humans that threaten it.
Based on the characters from DC, THE FLASH is from Bonanza Productions Inc. in association with Berlanti Productions and Warner Bros. Television, with executive producers Greg Berlanti (“Arrow,” “Supergirl”), Andrew Kreisberg (“Arrow,” “The Flash”), Sarah Schechter (“Arrow,” “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow”) and Todd Helbing (“Black Sails”).
More The Flash news:
- The Flash Casts Its Season 4 Big Bad, Adds Danny Trejo & More To Cast
- The Flash Season 4 Trailer Released
- DC TV Stars Share Awesome Comic-Con Arrival Photos
- The Flash Vs Reverse Flash In New Mondo Poster
