2. It’s A Show About The Batman Without Having The Batman
From the very first second of Bat-butler Alfred’s expository monologue in the pilot, to the mysterious phone call with Bruce Wayne at the end of the series, we are painfully aware that Birds of Prey is a show about Batman, without actually being about Batman. How can a Batman themed show not feature the Batman, you ask? Well all of the Bat accoutrements are still here — being the heir to the Wayne estate, Huntress inherits Wayne Manor, and indentured servant Alfred Pennyworth (whose long life must be indicative of some sort of meta-human gene), Mark Hamill lent his voice to the Joker in the unaired version of the pilot, and even Barbara Gordon is able to utilize bat-tech to enable her to walk around and fight crime as Batgirl for two episodes, or when convenient to the plot. Birds of Prey banked off of Batman fans seeking an additional fix without ever actually featuring the Batman himself beyond the opening credits. You can’t just sell us awesome high-grade Batman bits cut with the proverbial flour that is the Birds of Prey. Either go fully committed and give us the Batman, like Young Justice featuring Batman in a drill instructor role, or insist that we don’t need our fix and make us go cold turkey a la Teen Titans.
It’s as if the show wants fans to care about someone other than the Batman, and yet the caped crusader is the first image that we see in the preamble to every episode. For legal issues however, and the fact that Batman Begins was still in production at the time, Batman doesn’t appear on screen, beyond the opening, which in and of itself is fine. This article isn’t about why Birds of Prey should’ve just been about the Batman, however even the constant allusions to the Dark Knight paints a picture of a Batman who isn’t very Batmanly.
Allow me to explain myself with a timeline of the Birds of Prey universe. First, there was Batman and Batgirl fighting The Joker and his empire of crime in New Gotham City. The Joker is able to get away, hiring a henchman, later revealed to be Clayface, to kill Selina Kyle right in front of her daughter Helena, before the clown prince himself shoots Batgirl in the spine. Joker is apprehended, placed into a “prison that is very far away” (as we’re told in “Slick”) and the Batman leaves New Gotham for some reason. Seven years later, we are at the first episode of Birds of Prey, with Helena(now in her twenties) and Barbara fighting crime for presumably already a few years as the Birds of Prey. This means that Helena is at least a teenager or so when she saw her mom gunned down in front of her. A teenager, living with one of Batman’s only hookups in his war on crime and the queen of Gotham’s underworld. How did Batman, the master detective, not know that he had a daughter? He would have had to know about Selina’s death, as the Joker targeted her to specifically get back at the Batman, and even then, it’s absurd to think that the Batman wouldn’t have kept tabs on the head of Gotham’s criminal empire, even if Selina went legit for the sake of being a mother.
Now some of you may argue that Batman, or at least comic book Batman, didn’t know about his son Damien Wayne for years, but Damien was raised by the League of Shadows, with an emphasis on shadows, halfway across the globe. Selina was gunned down in the middle of a busy Gotham street, with Barbara later adopting the now-orphaned Helena. Batman, not knowing he had a kid without some sort of crazy explanation — robo-sperm holding Bruce Wayne’s genetic material in Batman Beyond for example — seems like a pretty glaring lack of sleuthing for a guy who once went back in time to out-detective Sherlock Holmes.
