When Afa and I first started dating, many people commented “wow, you two have nothing in common.” Now, Acts 2:44 tells us that the believers had “all things in common,” but one can imagine my excitement when I discovered that our interests in movies overlapped! I had finally identified something tangible we both enjoyed. We both like action movies, especially comedic ones, which works out well because that is a relatively broad category. It obviously includes all the Marvel movies, which we love. (I am also happy that Eliam LOVES them too. He and I can cuddle and watch the whole movie together even when his brother and sister want to go watch cartoons.)
Afa’s favorite way to decompress is to watch TV, and he can watch TV far into the night. We compromise and watch TV because he likes to, but I get to go to bed early even when he chooses to stay up. Because we don’t often have long periods of time to watch in the evenings, it’s less than ideal to have to make choices every night. In the spirit of ease, we choose a show and watch all the episodes of that show in order. There are a few requirements of the shows that we choose. First, it must be clean. It cannot have swearing, sex, or graphic violence in it. We prefer shows that have multiple seasons so that we can stick with it for a long time, and we have also been told when describing the shows we love, that high quality television is not on the list of requirements. To meet all of these, we have found that older, network-based shows are often the best way to go. New Netflix shows are wildly inappropriate, and the clean ones usually only have limited episodes.
Some of our past shows include Bones, NCIS, Fringe, Grimm, Blacklist, Criminal Minds, and Quantico. To watch with the kids, we love Avatar the Last Airbender, The Dragon Prince, Jurassic Park: Camp Cretaceous, and Boss Baby. One time we tried to watch Supernatural, which qualifies based on the standard requirements. When we started watching it, it was obvious how much Afa loved it, but about four episodes in, I had to tell him that I couldn’t watch it anymore. I don’t handle ghosts, demons, or darkness well at all, so even quippy shows about those things didn’t make the cut.
One day, very much by accident, we stumbled upon the Arrowverse. We had finished all the Marvel movies and the Star Wars movies on Disney, and then I saw a thumbnail of The Flash on our Netflix home screen. I didn’t know anything about Flash except that he was a superhero, and I thought it would be worth checking out since superhero was a reliable genre for both of us. In the middle of the episode, he has a conversation with a brooding guy in a green hood. It’s clear that the two men have some sort of history, and I began to put the pieces together. I hopped on Google to figure out what was going on, and it opened a whole new world to me.
Instead of watching anymore episodes of The Flash, we went back and started with Arrow. Two full seasons of Arrow aired before that first episode of the Flash, and they are the old standard 22 episode seasons, so it took us a while to wind our way back to that first episode of Flash. I am not a movie/TV critic in any way, but we thoroughly enjoyed the first two seasons of Arrow. In fact, we enjoyed all the seasons of Arrow. It is one of our favorite shows in the Arrowverse. It has some dark themes and is not nearly as funny as some of the other shows, but the action sequences are excellent, and the characters are engaging. There are some gruesome episodes, so that can be important to keep in mind. As we kept watching, we cycled through The Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, and Black Lightning.
We have been watching Arrowverse shows for nearly two years without ever having to discuss what we would watch next or scroll through Netflix to find something we would both enjoy, only to watch five minutes of it and realize that neither of us is going to enjoy it. There are certainly episodes in the Arrowverse that are generally bad, but Afa and I enjoy critiquing those as much as we enjoy loving the other ones. Many nights we sit down and watch only a single episode before I go to bed, but it’s a consistent way for us to connect before the end of the day.
Legends of Tomorrow is by far our favorite. It is laugh out loud funny, and the characters get in progressively ridiculous situations. It has no grounding in reality, and that is a large part of its draw. Supergirl is our least favorite of all the shows, but it gets better as the seasons progress. We watch them in order even if we don’t like the show so that we can get the most out of the crossover episodes. One of the most exciting things about the Arrowverse is that they have annual crossover episodes that get larger as more shows are added to the lineup. It’s a blast to watch all the characters we had gotten to know so well interact in new environments with different people. The crossovers culminate in the Crisis on Infinite Earths, which doubles as the series finale of Arrow and is as exciting as it sounds.
If the kids are around while watching, The Flash and Supergirl are the most kid friendly. Both Arrow and Black Lightning can be heavy on violence, sometimes graphic violence.
Understandably, it’s not for everyone, but we have thoroughly enjoyed the consistency and ease that came along with watching the Arrowverse shows in order from the beginning.