A few months ago when I had nothing on Hulu or Amazon or Disney+ I wanted to watch, I remembered I had the CW app on my Roku. They had added the full season of Stargirl, so I decided to watch that. (Short review: I wish it had been 8 eps instead of 13.) At the end of the episode a window popped up recommending other shows, one of which was Birds of Prey, the short-lived series from 2002-2003 on what was then the WB. I had watched a few episodes back then but I hadn't seen the whole 13-episode season so I decided to give it a try.
And really it wasn't bad for what it was. A Michael Offutt type would say that it doesn't look as good as Stargirl or The Flash but it was 2002, so what do you expect? At the time the new age of superhero movies had just started with X-Men and Spider-Man and Smallville had hit the airwaves just the year before, so of course it wouldn't be as polished as shows that came along on the CW and Netflix 10-15 years later. As long as you can appreciate it in context it's a pretty decent show and one that was ahead of its time--as the title of the article says.
The main focus of the show is "Huntress" who isn't the Huntress from the comics and later Arrow TV show. That Huntress was the daughter of a mob boss who goes around killing people with a crossbow, though sometimes she doesn't kill people because Batman and company don't really like that.
This Huntress is named Helena. She's the daughter of Batman and the retired Catwoman. Though neither of them is supposed to have real superpowers, Helena is a metahuman with superhuman reflexes--catlike reflexes. Before the show begins, her mother is murdered and her father has disappeared, so she went to live with Barbara Gordon, who was Batgirl until she was crippled by the Joker and since then works as a high school science teacher. She also is the white hat hacker known as Oracle, who along with Huntress fights evil in "New Gotham." (I'm not sure why they chose to call it New Gotham since it's not really in the future, but maybe it was based on the then-recent "Cataclysm" and "No Man's Land" stories in the comics that had destroyed original Gotham.)
The first episode begins with a teenage girl named Dinah Lance coming to town on a bus. When she's harassed by a young Aaron Paul, Huntress saves her. Dinah is a runaway with nowhere to go so she comes to stay with Barbara and Huntress in their clock tower loft headquarters. It turns out Dinah has psychic powers that come in handy when they have to fight a metahuman who can mess with people's minds.
The first episode sets the template for the season, which was largely the same template Smallville followed in its first season the previous year: there's an evil metahuman and Huntress, Dinah, and Barbara--along with a friendly cop played by Shemar Moore, who voices Cyborg in some of the more recent animated movies--have to find a way to take him/her/it down. There is also a larger story as Helena sees a therapist: Dr. Harleen Quinzel, as in Harley Quinn. This Harley Quinn is normal looking and middle-aged (played by Ferris Bueller's Mia Sara) and secretly controlling New Gotham's rackets.
In the last episodes of the season, Harley finally reveals herself as a villain and nearly destroys our heroes until they can find a way to stop her. The series ended with Alfred calling Bruce Wayne on the phone. Since there was no second season, there was never a chance to find out where Bruce was or why he had spent the last few years away from his daughter and New Gotham. During the season Dinah had been developing her psychic powers, adding some telekinesis and stuff, so that's something that would also have been developed more in a second season. Barbara's fiance was murdered by Harley, which also would have been something to go into a second season. But now we'll never know how it would play out.
Besides the plot structure, this followed Smallville in that the heroes never wear costumes, except on a couple of occasions when Barbara is in her old Batgirl costume (black with a yellow cape). In the pilot episode Helena wears some flimsy dress and bulky overcoat thing but after that she mostly wears a less revealing pants, blouse, and black overcoat. Dinah and Oracle also just wear normal clothes for the most part. Even Dinah's biological mother Black Canary (played by recent jailbird Lori Laughlin) wore normal clothes. The Black Canary thing was kind of weird as Dinah Lance is a traditional name for Black Canary, but instead she had psychic powers instead of the "Canary Cry" while her mother had a different name.
The "metahuman" thing seemed more inspired by X-Men than DC properties. Metahumans were generally viewed as freaks and for the most part tried to hide. A few times in the series Helena visits a secret bar for metahumans and we see their different powers like the bartender/owner has a perfect memory while others have more extreme abilities.
Anyway, as the title said, this show was ahead of its time in that it brought the girl power fifteen years before there was a Wonder Woman movie and eighteen years before that Birds of Prey Harley Quinn movie. The three main heroes are all female and the main villain is female. About the closest I can think any other superhero show has come to this is Jessica Jones. Even Stargirl, which is named for a female character, has a supporting cast that's largely male. You routinely had a female character in Helena kicking the crap out of male characters while you also had Barbara who was super smart and always figuring shit out. So you can't complain that the female characters were weak or dumb and most of the time didn't need a male character to bail them out, though the cop would usually help and there was some time dedicated to hooking up him and Helena. I'm just saying as far as female empowerment goes, it was ahead of its time.
I watched it on the CW Seed app but probably at the start of the year they took that and most of the other DC programming off of there. I don't see it yet on HBO Max but maybe it'll show up there eventually. If nothing else I'm sure you can buy it on DVD for pretty cheap.
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