During The Batman director Matt Reeves’ appearance during the DC FanDome event, and with a keen eye on corporate synergy, he discussed the upcoming Gotham P.D. live-action series that will debut on HBO Max (timing for that one is TBD but we can safely bet it will be alongside The Batman’s theatrical launch next fall). Up until now the only thing we knew about the show was that it would be overseen by Reeves and Terrence Winter, who created Boardwalk Empire for HBO and wrote the script for Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. Tonight, Reeves shed a little more light on what, exactly, the new should would be.

It sounds like this new series will truly explore the corrupt history of Gotham – something that other projects have threatened but never really followed through on. “For me, the idea of this story was a story in which Gotham, which has this depth of corruption, and then the idea that we could  actually do a series that is going deeper into an aspect of it, which in this case is the corrupt police department and the corrupt inner workings of the city,” Reeves promised.

Reeves then talked about the way that he and Winter will be approaching the story, which is to actually set it before the events of The Batman. “The idea is we go back to year one and year one is the beginning,” Reeves said. “It’s the first appearance of this masked vigilante that unsettles the city.”

Reeves then detailed how the appearance of Batman and the way that it affects the police force will greatly shape the series. He also alluded (in the vaguest way possible), of who the main character of the new series will be. “You start to see the story through the point-of-view of these corrupt cops. And one in particular. The story is actually a battle for his soul. He’s a cop over generations and the history of corruption in Gotham is enormous and goes back many years,” Reeves said.

As the myth of Batman begins to gain momentum, Reeves promised that you might see other characters from the various comic book series, intermingling with characters created specifically for the new HBO Max show. “As you realize there’s this myth building in the background, you are in a new place with these characters, some of whom will touch on that you may have seen from the comics and others totally new,” Reeves explained. “You can go down this avenue and go into detail that you couldn’t go into in the movie and go into these rich places and meet these characters Terrence is going to create.”

So, it sounds like Gotham P.D. is very much in the “early development” stages (hell, if they only got to shoot 25% of The Batman before the shutdown) but as far as series born exclusively out of synergistic corporate mandates, this one sounds pretty cool.

via Collider