I recently had the chance to catch up on season 3 of The Flash and season 2 of Supergirl on Netflix, both shows I have a ton of affection for, and neither of them disappointed. I felt The Flash bounced back from a relatively unfocused season 2 with a strong third effort, with Savitar serving as a much better Big Bad than Zoom, a guy whose over the top "I AM EVIL BECAUSE BEING EVIL IS GREAT" attitude should have worked better with me than it did because it was delivered by such a wooden actor. The general impression I got from many people was that Supergirl's sophomore effort was also weaker than her initial outing but I had to disagree. While the show certainly suffered a bit from the over-emphasis on Mon-El and the lack of Cat Grant, it more than made up for it with strong new characters like Maggie Sawyer, Miss Martian, and Lena Luthor. It also had the single best live action Superman we have had since Christopher Reeve. I could wax poetic for a long time about how great Tyler Hoechlin's Clark was, and perhaps at some point I will, but this is beside the point I want to make, which is these two recent seasons of Supergirl and Flash pretty much represent the culmination of the painfully slow process TV has taken in embracing all of the full-on bright, colorful weirdness that comic books provide.
This season of the Flash saw the multiverse and speed force name-dropped and utilized nearly every episode without even a word of explanation after previous seasons had established them. Multiple earths were visited and discussed with no one batting an eye. The Flash literally went to Gorilla City on Earth 2, where the always perfect Tom Cavanagh portrayed Harrison Wells-mind-controlled-by-a-malevolent-gorilla as he grunted the words "KILL OR BE KILLED! THIS IS THE LAW OF GORILLA KIND" and everyone in the room kept a straight face. There was a Mirror Master. The Music Meister instigated an entire musical episode. This was all before main villain was revealed to be a time-warped duplicate of Barry himself who was driven mad by eternal purgatory inside the speed force. Basically we've reached a point where I don't think there's anything comics Flash could do that couldn't also be done by TV Flash, other than hang out with his lucrative multi-billion dollar movie property friend Batman.
Supergirl, likewise, had not only the most faithful version of Superman shown on screen ever, it also heavily upped the amount of Martian Manhunter in full get-up (always a great decision), gave us a shape-shifting Durlan as President, and a Metallo inspired by the absolutely perfect Malcolm McDowell version from Superman The Animated Series. I am so happy they did not overthink Metallo as some kind of Iron Man suit or robot, they literally just gave us a British dude with cybernetic enhancements and a glowing green kryptonite heart. It was beautiful.
