The first season of the CW’s Arrow TV series combines an assortment of themes/genres.
It starts off quite good as a mixture of action-focused revenge story and courtroom drama, eventually adding police procedural elements, military survivalism flashbacks, thrillerish conspiracy-related developments, assorted familial/relationship drama, and a fairly large number of romantic subplots. Some parts work better than others.
The action scenes are solid throughout and I have no complaints regarding the acting or casting (though some characters seem overly similar to one another). The justice-themed monologues however pretty much universally fall flat, him working alone initially plays better than him working with employees (once the tech expert joins it evens out), the background conspiracy is pretty sketchy, and I don’t buy that simply wearing a hood magically makes someone completely unrecognizable.
It’s a good show, but perhaps just a bit too meandering. I think this season would’ve been better at about half the length with most of the secondary subplots, particularly the ‘crisis of faith’ and re-occurring secret identity drama, cut out to focus entirely on the main revenge/conspiracy.
