She's bitter about not just that, but also that her security-consultant father submarined her plans to join a fascist paramilitary unit that's been protecting Gotham since Batman disappeared for unexplained reasons three years ago.
The irony here is that The CW's revived Batwoman is a lesbian toughie named Kate Kane who got kicked out of a military academy after she was caught kissing her girlfriend. She lasted until 1964, when DC decided her guy was past his homosexual panic and unceremoniously killed her off.
#Nancy drew tv show review full#
The Batwoman character was born in 1956 after the publication of a scathing attack on the comic-book industry called Seduction of the Innocent, which claimed, among other things, that Batman and Robin were ticking gay time bombs that would destroy American youth.ĭC Comics quickly came up with a love interest for Batman who was neither male nor underage: Batwoman, a former circus performer whose purse was full of what looked like feminine appurtinences like lipstick and charm bracelets but were actually lethal Bat-style weapons. If the lesson of previous Nancy Drews was that girls have the capacity to be much more than mommies and wives, this time around it seems to be that they have the capacity for boundless bile and endless animus.īatwoman, on the other hand, has an impressive capacity for irony, if you know the backstory. Her tomboy best friend George (Leah Lewis, Charmed) has unaccountably not turned into a lesbian but Nancy's irascible boss. Her boyfriend Ned Nickerson (Shakespearian actor Tunji Kasim) now calls himself "Nick" and has turned into an ex-con. Nancy's amiable lawyer dad Carson (Scott Wolf, The Night Shift) has turned into a predatory sleaze, and she hates him. She changes her mind only when she becomes a murder suspect herself. "I don't go searching in the dark anymore, not after the darkness found me," she declares in her endlessly self-important narration. Even the curiosity that led to her detective agencies is extinguished. This Nancy is no longer a high-school kid but a kid embittered by the death of her mother, which messed up her SAT scores and left her as a greasy-spoon waitress. Just as it did in its sullen Archie adaptation Riverdale, the network has squeezed all the light-heartedness and charm out of its characters in favor of morose despondency and leaden bitchery.
But her Nancy falls short in every other respect. Newcomer Kennedy McMahon, who plays the title role in The CW's new version of Nancy Drew, certainly passes the cuteness test. She sounded much more fun to hang out with than her dorky literary cousins, the Hardy Boys, and that was even before we knew she looked like Pamela Sue Martin. She raced around town in a sporty little roadster, fearlessly barged into haunted houses and deserted warehouses and lairs of killer robots. She was much more interested in solving crimes than boys or clothes. This despite (or maybe it was because of?) the fact that Nancy was unquestionably the coolest girl around. Teachers hated her-when a girl in my fourth-grade classroom made the mistake of mentioning a Nancy novel, the instructor erupted into an unhinged tirade about how the books were trash and no decent parent would allow a kid to read one-and librarians generally refused to stock her. That's an impressive record given all the opposition to Nancy over the years. And that's not even counting three versions of Veronica Mars, who was essentially an underclass clone of Nancy. The teenage-detective hero of The CW's Nancy Drew, for instance, since 1930 has been the star of something close to 200 novels, six TV shows (not all of which made it to air) and five movies. Worse yet, their histories are a lot more interesting than any of the shows. In fact, the final bloc of TV premieres are remakes or rehashes or re-inflictions of shows from those ancient times, all rooted in the 1950s or even earlier. That croaking sound you hear from your television set is the death rattle of the rollout of television's fall season, dragging itself to the finish line with some of the worst Nielsen numbers since the primordial TV days of shows about crime-busting postal inspectors.
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