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Although Fox’s Gotham – a television series following Detective Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie), a member of the Gotham City Police Department – doesn’t officially premiere on the network until September, the show has been highly promoted. A slew of featurettes and promos have depicted the cast talking about their characters and relationships, or given a deeper look into the city itself – most importantly, they’ve introduced Gotham’s “most dangerous villains.” Fox also released character posters for the eight main players in Gotham, including Gordon. With early reviews for the Gotham pilot touting the show’s excellence, it’s understandable that many are looking forward to finally seeing it for themselves.
In little more than 10 days, Fox and DC will premiere the pilot of Gotham at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. However, for those not attending, a new trailer for Gotham gives another peak into the much-anticipated series.
Released on the official Gotham YouTube channel, the new trailer (above) emphasizes the origin story aspect of the upcoming series as well as the main conflict between good and evil within the city limits: “The Good. The Evil. The Beginning.” — a tagline that also appeared on the recently released character posters. The video depicts Gordon walking onto a crime scene surrounded by the, at this point, recognizable faces of Selina Kyle (Camren Bicondova), Oswald Cobblepot (Robin Lord Taylor), Fish Mooney (Jada Pinkett Smith), and Edward Nigma (Cory Michael Smith); Donal Logue also appears in the trailer as Harvey Bullock.
McKenzie’s Gordon has a voiceover in the trailer that explains he is returning to Gotham because the city “is at a tipping point” and he believes himself to be one of the few willing to fight crime and corruption before it overruns his hometown:
This is my city, I’ve come back because I care what’s happening to it. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who cares. This town is at a tipping point. Crime and corruption ooze from every corner. Someone needs to take a stand against it all — and that is where we come in.
One shot in the video depicts Gordon holding the front page of the Gotham Gazette with the headline: “War Hero Makes Detective” with “Welcome Home” scrawled in red ink (or, more likely, blood). Whether this particular shot foreshadows the struggle between Gordon’s “good” and Gotham’s “evil,” or teases a certain villain targeting the detective in season 1 won’t be known until the pilot premieres.
While the first full length trailer for Gotham may have been divisive in terms of whether the tone seemed to fit the upcoming series — listen to the SR Underground discussion — this new video has a much more definitive tone. With fewer computer generated shots of Gotham reflecting in a river and a soundtrack more suitable for a gritty, modern police procedural (Aloe Blacc’s “Ticking Bomb”) the new trailer may offer renewed hope to those who were less than impressed by the first look at Gotham.
However, what the new trailer makes up for in terms of tone it lacks in new footage from the upcoming series. The shots of Gordon, Kyle, Cobblepot, Mooney, Nigma, and Bullock seem to have been shot specifically for the video and provide no new scenes that we can expect to see when Gotham premieres — though, with the pilot debut at SDCC so soon, that is certainly intentional.
Gotham premieres on Fox on Monday, September 22nd, 2014 at 8 p.m. ET/PT.
