Arrow says goodbye after significantly changing The CW's trajectory and perception

[TMC]

https://www.tvguide.com/news/arrow-s...legacy-the-cw/

The superhero series ending tonight after eight seasons paved the way for The CW's DC shared universe and annual multi-show crossovers. It also led to The CW's male viewership jumping from 30% in 2011 to 50% in 2017. "It's hard to imagine that ordering Arrow to series was ever considered a bold move for The CW, but the success of the show was never a sure thing," says Kaitlin Thomas. "When the DC series launched, The CW was known more for — and I say this lovingly — melodramatic, female-centric programs like Gossip Girl and 90210 or the wacky antics of dramedies like Hart of Dixie than it was for comic book fare. This was despite the fact Smallville had just ended a 10-season run, split between The WB and The CW, a year prior. Meanwhile, there was no guarantee that the growing success of Marvel's feature films — The Avengers had come out just five months earlier — would translate to the small screen, especially on the fifth broadcast network and for a character who was not terribly well known outside the realm of DC Comics." Thomas adds: "However, even though the network benefited greatly from having Arrow as one of the programs leading its lineup these past eight years, the reality is that its success also resulted in a limited variety of programming being offered. The bold, creative choices that characterized the first half of the 2010s have given way to rubber stamping, both in terms of the types of shows the network develops and its renewal strategy. This leads to stability and consistency, and while knowing a show will likely end on its own terms is comforting for viewers, the result is still a network that, despite expanding original programming to six days a week in 2018 and increasing the number of original series it airs throughout the year, looks increasingly similar. This doesn't translate to bringing in potential new viewers — or retaining those who've grown tired of the superhero genre."

ALSO:

• Arrow bosses promise to give everyone a satisfying ending: "It’s really important for me and Marc (Guggenheim) to honor all of our characters,” says showrunner Beth Schwartz. “We spent a lot of time in the room brainstorming endings for all our characters, whether they were series regulars in Season 8 or they were series regulars in Season 1. We really wanted to give everyone a satisfying ending, so that you could envision what their lives would be like after the show was over.”
• Arrow cast and crew post farewell messages in advance of the series finale "Today’s bittersweet," tweeted Stephen Amell. "Arrow meant so much to me for so many years. It was a transformative journey... but it was time to let it go. I lace my boots and don the hood one last time tonight. I’ll forever cherish being an ambassador for Oliver Queen. Thank you for the honor."
• Presenting Arrow's 25 best fights

Arrow's "different kind" of series finale "turned out to be the right way to end the show"

Co-creator Marc Guggenheim says of ending Arrow after eight seasons: "We always knew that 'Crisis' would result in the death of Oliver, and we knew that the series finale, therefore, was going to be very different from what I had originally thought it would be. I always felt that Oliver should die at the end of Arrow. Stephen Amell and I were always very much on the same page about that. So I always thought the show would end with the death of Oliver Queen but then when we realized we were doing Crisis and we came up with the idea of Oliver dying in that story it basically made the series finale more of a coda, which is totally fine, and we always knew it was going to have a funeral. We knew a variety of different moments. What we didn’t have was what I sort of call a unifying principle. We didn’t have a theme. We didn’t have something that tied all these different elements that we knew we wanted to have in it together." Guggenheim adds: "I was in the editing room one day and I was watching a cut for the gazillionth time I heard Stephen delivering the saga sell, which always ends with or has as part of it, came home with only one goal to save my city. I realized that’s it. He won. He achieved the goal that we’ve been reiterating for eight years, which is save his city. I think really good series finales, you’ve got to get off of Gilligan’s Island and M*A*S*H the Korean War has to end. In Arrow, he always said his mission was to save the city and we got to see through Crisis that he succeeded and give the audience a little bit of a glimpse as to what that post saving the city world looks like. What was really helpful is once I hit upon that idea it became very clear as to what the effect on the individual characters would be and that, again, sort of gave the finale the unifying principle that we were on the hunt for."

ALSO:

• Is there a chance Stephen Amell can return in the future?: "The one thing I always say, every time a character dies on any of these shows, it’s like we’ve got alternate realities, we’ve got time travel, flashbacks, you name it," says Marc Guggenheim. "We have all these different devices. No one’s ever really gone…I think it would be how we brought him back and when. If we brought him back in the seventh season premiere of Flash, it would probably diminish this a bit.
• Showrunner Beth Schwartz says Arrow writers “always left it open at the end of Season 7 to have that final scene"
• Guggenheim can't speak to some of the finale's burning questions: "That I can’t really speak to because this moment was, like a lot of things, a sort of negotiation with the powers that be about, ‘Okay, what exactly can we show? How far can we take this?’ I think it’s probably best. To me, the best approach was to let the moment speak for itself and we’ll sort of see where the future takes us.”

Arrow departs with low viewership

About 723,000 watched last night's series finale of the eight-season CW superhero series. That's a 20% drop from the penultimate episode.

Arrow co-creator came up with the final scene while meditating

“I meditate every morning,” Marc Guggenheim told press at a screening of the finale, according to TVLine. “And this one morning, I came out of the meditation with the entire scene in my head, like literally word-for-word exactly (as) you just watched it….This has never happened to me before.”