Gotham Showrunner Confirms Red Hood is Coming, Talks Costumed Characters

Costumed characters won't be coming to Gotham in earnest just yet, says executive producer Bruno [...]

By Russ Burlingame

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Costumed characters won't be coming to Gotham in earnest just yet, says executive producer Bruno Heller in an interview with Comic Book Resources -- but he's starting to establish the context for them...beginning with the Red Hood.

The masked villain -- an identity shared between numerous crooks, one of whom would eventually go on to become The Joker -- will appear in an episode of Gotham this season, Heller confirmed. 

The revelation came after he was asked abuot the possibility of costumed characters arriving on the show:

That's a good question. Especially now that we have a pick up, I always take a long-term view of a show. I'm looking at several years. So we're in no hurry to [do that] -- there's going to be an episode that involves the Red Hood, which picks up that strand, the costume strand, and sort of gives a kind of philosophical base, if that's not too pretentious a word. Why costumes? What's the power of costumes? What's the power of a mask? All of that groundwork will be laid sort of culturally for that side of the DC Universe before we start rolling into the more spectacular spandex type of deal.

Because -- I can't remember where I read it -- the reason that the comic book characters wore costumes is because in the very rough printing that they used to have in newspapers, that's the only way you could make a character pop. "Oh, that's Batman, that's Superman, that's Dick Tracy." On TV, you don't need that same color and signature to make people pop. It's the characters that pop. So we're never going to be a full-on costume drama. We're going to be a full-on character drama. Like Batman, there's the super powers, super will, and there's super strength, but only on a human level. Not on a supernatural level. It's very important, again, for the longevity of the show, that we take this step by step.

Of course, a newly-relesed synopsis shows that Scarecrow is also coming soon...so sooner than later, we're going to start seeing more villains wearing masks during their work, at least.

Gotham airs Mondays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on FOX.

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