Stargirl will be The CW’s Only DC Show This Fall

Earlier today, The CW announced its fall schedule, giving audiences and advertisers a sense for what the network is going to be up to in late 2022 and early 2023. For the first time since The Flash premiered in 2014, there is only one DC adaptation — DC’s Stargirl, which begins its third season — on the schedule. Yes, there are three more DC shows still  being produced for The CW, but Stargirl stands alone as a result of a confluence of factors. First, both The Flash and Superman & Lois are picking up their next seasons as mid-season shows, and newcomer Gotham Knights is not starting up until early 2023.

Second, of course, is the cancellations. Batwoman and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow were cancelled last month, and before that, both Black Lightning and Supergirl had seen their series finales in 2021.

“We’re staying in the superhero business,” The CW’s chairman and CEO Mark Pedowitz told reporters ahead of today’s presentation. “We’re not as robust as we were, but we’re still there….We plan to stay in that business.”

In addition to being the only DC show on The CW’s fall schedule, Stargirl is a bit of a strange animal because the character is only kinda-sorta part of the “Arrowverse,” the shared DC continuity that began with Arrow and The Flash. Canonically, Stargirl takes place on the reconstituted Earth-2, which was created following the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths. But other than an upcoming appearance in the Earth-Prime comic, the character will never have met the heroes of the other Arrowverse shows. She and her cast made a brief cameo in Crisis, but it was just stepping out of the shadows to pose, establishing that Earth-2 existed again after the destruction and rebirth of the multiverse.

It also marks the first time since Arrow debuted that no series set on Earth-Prime (nee Earth-1), the Arrowverse’s “main” Earth, has appeared on the network’s fall schedule.

Justice U, a pilot centering on David Ramsey’s Arrow character, seems to have fallen off the radar in favor of the similarly-premised Gotham Knights, but it has not officially been declared dead at this point. In that pilot, after spending years fighting alongside masked heroes, John Diggle embarks on a new mission to recruit five young meta humans to live undercover as freshmen at a prestigious university. There he will oversee their education and train them to become the heroes of tomorrow. Gotham Knights sees the son of Bruce Wayne team up with the teen children of some Bat-villains to form a Runaways-style team of heroes who fight crime while fighting to clear their name after they are wrongly accused of murdering Batman.

That generational aspect seems to be creeping into everything on The CW now. In the coming season, there will be a prequel series to Walker, in which Katherine McNamara plays an ancestor of the famed Texas Ranger, as well as The Winchesters, a show that centers on the parents of Supernatural‘s Sam and Dean Winchester. Combine that with Stargirl, which sees the stepdaughter of a Justice Society-era sidekick starting her own team of teen superheroes to take on the JSA’s leftover bad guys, and Superman & Lois, in which the Man of Steel has to juggle parenting with his world-saving duties, and a clear theme starts to emerge, even if it doesn’t seem likely it’s on purpose.

DC’s Stargirl will air on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT, ahead of new episodes of Kung Fu in the fall.