By “Arrow” premiered in 2012, the series joining the network The CW which had been struggling with a number of so-so rated female-driven soaps and dramedies like “Hart of Dixie,” “Gossip Girl,” “90210” and “The Vampire Diaries”.
Long-standing “Supernatural” was about the only show that had a wider demographic audience. It was about that time Mark Pedowitz succeeded Dawn Ostroff as the network’s president of entertainment.
With it, he switched the focus from women 18–34 to all adults 18-34 and key to that was “Arrow,” the DC Comics adaptation that launched a wave of six successful comic book shows on the network with a shared universe (dubbed the ‘Arrowverse’) that ultimately spanned nearly 700 episodes and thirty-seven seasons of television.
Marc Guggenheim, co-creator and executive producer on “Arrow” over its eight seasons, appeared on The Showrunner Whisperer podcast recently and says he felt “the pressure of keeping the whole network on the air” at one time.
He added that at one point, just after the pilot was ordered to series, Warner Bros. TV chairman Peter Roth “took us out to lunch and basically laid out for us in incredible detail the reality that if Arrow wasn’t a hit, there would be no more CW.”
He added: “They were special times for the industry. I don’t think we could do ‘Arrow’ today, certainly not the way we had originally done it, I don’t think we could have done it with the amount of leeway and creative freedom that we had. It was a very special, unique time in the business that, you know, may not come again.”
Greg Berlanti and Andrew Kreisberg also executive produced the series which led to the ven more successful “The Flash,” beloved cult hit “Legends of Tomorrow” and the solid performing “Supergirl”.
Guggenheim most recently produced Amazon’s “Carnival Row”.
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