Robin Gravel's Blog

The third season definitely fell flat (I recently watched the series on Blu-ray). Certainly getting rid of the two-part cliffhanger episodes hurt. Especially trying to tell stories with three lead heroes in just a half-hour.

 

I didn't mind the addition of Batgirl (that purple batsuit...) except she wasn't utilized very well. Perhaps with the longer, two-part episodes that would have helped.

 

One big thing that bothered me though was that the show felt "cheap" in season three. Instead of building proper villains' lairs, they just had empty black rooms with a handful of props. While that could be considered "abstract" or "avant-garde", it just became distracting.

But I think a lot of the failure of the third season had to do with the writing. The first two seasons were intentionally satirical. Everything was completely absurd (in Adam West's own words), but they played it completely straight. This is what made Airplane (and the Police Squad TV series) so good. There's a fair amount of socio-political commentary in there. The third season lost a lot of that satirical edge, and became just silly. Especially some of the villains, where it seemed the showrunners were more concerned with guest villains, than good villains.

 

The show actually was picked up by NBC - the problem was the sets had already been destroyed, and it was too expensive to rebuild them.

Like Nathan just said, the destruction of the sets, especially the Bat Cave set is what really finished off the chances of the series being picked up by NBC. If I recall the commentary from the Movie DVD correctly, both Adam West and Burt Ward were always puzzled at just how fast the studio demolished the sets. Also, they mentioned that by the third season, ABC was once again in the red because they had bungled the money Batman had brought them on crappy projects and failed series. So, by season three there was no budget left to do the show properly.

I read ABC starts losing viewers at 2nd season. Maybe two/three-part cliffhanger episodes become predictable.

 

Mr Freeze is played by two comedians. The notable is John Austin. He keeps his moustache while playing the riddler.

 

It's more like Charles Addams (the Addams family) became the villain in Batman.

 

Maybe ABC should not make Batman 3rd season.

 

At the last episode of second season, there's a preview of the first episode of the first season.

Certainly part of Batman's success was due to its initial status as a fad. It was so massively popular, so fast, they made a feature film between the first and second seasons. That's unheard of! Plus there was massive merchandising for the show as well. But once the fad had reached saturation, the novelty wore off, and viewership dropped. I think it had largely run its course by season 3. Some series are just never meant to maintain that sort of peak level of interest.

 

That said, I think they could have kept it better for a longer period, but the network execs were more interested in riding the wave of popularity, than maintaining a high standard. Hollywood is all about the quick cash grab, and not long term sustainability. But that explains why NBC was willing to pick it up. If they could've made even some of the money ABC had, they would have happily kept it going for another season or two. It might have been terrible though - depending on the writing.