Discussion on Character Development in TV

Tom understands this m- more than Chris and I ever will,

but I've had enough

experience kind of working in the comic space and going like, "You're,

you're, you, you are mining this character for a period

of time, and then someone

else is gonna mine it. But you have to acknowledge and,

and pay tribute to

everybody who was mining the character be- before you did." And so, but I think

that ultimately we understood that the pilot was presenting a, um,

a conflict, and the conflict was one ring, two guys.

Mm-hmm.

And one... And, and Hal didn't wanna give up the ring,

even though he was closer to

the end of his career-

Of course

... than he should be. And I think that there, there,

there's a lot kind of in the

zeitgeist that we were all feeling about the sort of idea of

when,

if, when is it time to kind of like hand over-

Right

... the institutional power of a position to

the, the younger

gen- to the next generation.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and the idea that Hal didn't wanna let go.

And I think that if I were watching that on TV, I'd be like,

"They're gonna find a

way to compromise, and they're gonna make two rings.

And they, and, and, and they're, they're, they're both gonna, they're, they're

gonna be able to share at the end."

Partners. It's all gonna happen.

And, and, and that felt like very kind of like hokey

and frustrating and, and

not HBO and not even Green Lantern.

And so we were like, what if we signal to the audience that

only, like, that, that Hal was not gonna make it until the end of

this, uh, season, at least that's what we're presenting

here.

Yeah.

W- When, when do we wanna show that card? It's like, let's just get it.

Let, let's just do it in the pilot.

Mm-hmm.

We want people who are leaving the first episode to know

exactly what it is they're

getting into versus to get all the way to the finale and then kill

Hal. Um, that, that felt like it was cheap.

Yeah. The fun thing that I thought about

was how many Hal Jordan fans did you piss

off by killing him in the first episode?

All of them.

All of them, including ourselves.