Of all the shows The CW renewed today during their presentation at the Television Critics Association, one of the most predictable was Arrow, the long-running DC Comics adaptation that “started it all,” kickstarting a shared universe between four series on the network and three animated series on their web-based sister station CW Seed.
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While it’s not surprising that Arrow was renewed, however, it’s worth taking a quick look at what the renewal might mean for the series.
Why? Well, Arrow is in for a bit of a soft reboot next year. While executive producer Marc Guggenheim recently told us that every year is a new beginning for Arrow, season 6 will be even more dramatically so: if you’ve seen the series, you know that each episode begins with the voiceover explanation that “after five years in hell…”
Those five years have always been represented by flashback sequences that take place in nearly every episode, with Oliver’s shipwrecked years often mirroring events that are taking place in the present day.
…Well, five years will soon be up.
“Last year, when we sort of realized we’re going to go past Season 5, we basically made a collective decision that Season 5 would be the final year of flashbacks,” Guggenheim said recently. “Next year, in Season 6, what we’ll end up doing is we’ll do some episodes without any sort of flashbacks. We’ve [also] established over the first four seasons of proof of concept that we can do flashback stories that don’t involve what I call the island narrative, even when he’s not on the island.”
So — yeah, this isn’t new information. The showrunners had already planned around a version of the show without Oliver’s years in Hell, knowing that a renewal was as likely as we all assumed it was.
“We still want to make that part of our storytelling, because we do like them. We like when those non-island flashbacks sort of illuminate what’s going on in the present day,” Guggenheim added. “That’ll always be a part of the show and a part of the show’s storytelling structure. It just won’t be telling a serialized story.”
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The series will also likely have a new face when it returns in season 6; the members of the original Team Arrow have been scattered to the four winds this season, but seem to be playing a bigger and bigger role as the season wears on. Meanwhile, the new recruits will likely not be all gone when the show returns next season.
Arrow airs Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW. “Who Are You?” debuts on January 25, 2017.
