Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)One of television's overlooked gems! This show is yet another example of a network killing a promising offering by not letting it find an audience.
It was 1990. Pop culture was buzzing from the blockbuster success of Tim Burton's Batman. Star Trek: TNG was in its glory years. (X-Files and Lois and Clark were still three years off). CBS introduced this show in the fall. No problem, right? WRONG! CBS at the time had the rights to postseason baseball, and as a result, The Flash pinballed around the schedule, rarely appearing for consecutive weeks in the same time slot. It also didn't help that it was up against The Simpsons for part of its run. If they had waited until after baseball and parked this thing on a Friday night for a couple of years (ala Fox and The X-Files) it would have hit.
But alas, it was not to be. Even the head of CBS (Jeff Sagansky at the time, if memory serves) later apologized to John Wesley Shipp for mishandling the show. The viewing public mostly missed out on this top-shelf superhero adaptation which was faithful enough for the comic geeks (that'd be me), yet accessible enough for the casual viewer.
John Wesley Shipp played the character perfectly. Amanda Pays (of the also ahead-of-its-time Max Headroom) was a delight. Guests to look for: Richard Belzer, Mark Hamill, Jeri Ryan, Jeffry Combs. My favorite guest: the ever-reliable Jason Bernard as "The Nightshade." Watch his episodes, and you'll see how the creators of Batman: The Animated Series used Nightshade as an inspiration for "The Grey Ghost."
With Smallville, the Spiderman movies, and Batman Begins really showing us how a superhero might fit into the "real" world, you'll be amazed at how ahead of its time this series was. I think it's safe to say that until the debut of Smallville, The Flash was the best live-action superhero adaptation ever put on television. And if you're going to judge on faithfulness to source material, The Flash is still #1.
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