Keep or Cancel: The future of Gotham beyond season 4
Let’s start by getting our own personal opinion out of the way: We want Gotham to stick around for as long as humanly possible. The Fox drama remains one of the most entertaining of its kind — it’s action-packed, creative, and over time it really has become the Batman show we’ve always wanted. It’s managed to improve every season and we’re hopefully building towards more great stuff coming up.
Unfortunately, the ratings offer up no guarantees that the series will be back.
The state of the Gotham season 4 ratings
In looking at some of the raw data alone, there are some reasons to be concerned over future of the series. It is averaging a 0.9 rating in the 18-49 demographic, the lowest that we’ve seen from the series in its four years on the air. The ratings have declined over the past couple of years, and this year in particular we’ve seen some of the numbers slide around 19% in the demo. That’s not great. Yet, the show does have a rather large streaming / DVR audience, and we know that the presence of the Jerome for at least some of the next few episodes (airing this spring) could help the show out quite a bit.
Why Gotham should be renewed
This show is one of the best on TV. Batman is popular all around the world, and as a result of that, you do want to think that this should have the viewership clout to withstand falling ratings here in America. We also think that quality here matters and Gotham is really just starting to get to the point where some of its heroes/villains are nearing its destiny. Bruce Wayne is more like Batman than he has ever been before. Meanwhile, we’re also seeing Selina Kyle act like Catwoman and we’re getting set to meet a full-fledged version of Poison Ivy. If you were to do a Gotham season 5, you could do it with characters who are much more like they were back in the original source material and it could be marketed as such.
Related – What do we want to see in the second half of Gotham season 4?
Why Gotham could be canceled
There are a couple of different things to be concerned about, with the ratings serving as one problem and another being the impending Fox acquisition by Disney. While it doesn’t appear as though there will be any immediate impact felt on Gotham by this, who knows if that will last? Gotham could possibly get a season 5 still, but beyond that we’re seeing a future that is a little more murky in that regard.
Our feeling
Keep Gotham for a fifth season and make it into the final one if you really need to. Based on how we’re projecting season 4 to end, that could be seen as a worthy conclusion to the show with Bruce becoming even more like Batman. (That’s something David Mazouz told CarterMatt in an interview at the start of the fall.) Yet, we think doing another season after this one would be an excellent way to culminate the entire series and to showcase’s Bruce’s growth.
Do you want to see a Gotham season 5 happen?
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