This year, Prime Video and Sony Pictures Television will break a decades-long drought with the first live-action Spider-Man TV show since th
Eh, personal preference but Gotham by Gaslight is the only one I liked one of those five. For TV shows specifically? Here are my choices for established Batman-specific Elseworlds (I'll do separate posts for other characters).
Batman: Gotham by Gaslight
The original when it comes to Elseworlds, the original story features a version of Batman that came to be in the 1880s fighting Jack the Ripper in a Gilded Age era Gotham City, but while the original comic and its animated adaptation were straight murder mysteries, the comic sequels (Master of the Future and the recent Kryptonian Age) leaned more into pulping steampunk stuff.
Given the success of such shows as the BBC's Ripper Street (a period murder mystery of the week show based in post-Jack the Ripper Whitechapel) and TNT's the Alienist (a show, based on a novel, about a proto-psychologist trying to invent behavioural profiling in 1890s New York), I think that a Gilded Age Batman show that blends murder mysteries with period details (Ripper Street had an episode regarding antisemitism in Victorian London's East End in the period, for example), could be a concept with legs. More so than just "the DCU but steampunk" which can be fun, but I feel was done better elsewhere.
Batman: the Doom that Came To Gotham
Another adaption of a Mike Mignola comic, but here with the action shifted to the 1920s and being more of an explicit Lovecraft homage. However, much like how I believe that Gaslight.. benefited from the additions brought to the animated movie, I think that Doom... could be benefit from some of the updated elements from its own animated movie (ie rather than Bruce having three identical white boys as his wards, having the animated film's Dick Grayson, Sanjay "Jay" Tawde, and Kai Li Cain there instead).
As we are purely in the realm of "If I could make the show then here's what I'd do", that while the original comic and the movie have a definite ending (Bruce turns into a man-bat permanently to defeat an eldritch beastie in the end), if its a show I'd hold off on that stuff until the finale and have Ra's al Ghul's cult be the series' big bad while dealing with Monster of the Week stuff in the 1920s Gotham setting as the doom slowly approaches.
Just saying, that there's a lot you can do with a 1920s pulp horror Batman show, especially if you expand outwards from purely Lovecraft's stuff. ...Plus Kai Li Cain is awesome, and more of her would be great regardless.
Catwoman: Lonely City
Somewhat cheating here, as while the story is Batman-centric, both him and every member of the Bat Family except Barbara Gordon is already dead before the action starts, with the actual protagonist being a middle-aged Selina Kyle, released after a decade in prison to find Gotham a police state, with the cops having coopted Batman's tech after reverse engineering his gear following his death.
Personally I think that for as good as the Penguin show was, the lack of crime dramas starting Catwoman is a huge oversight, an adaption of Lonely City as a neo-noir heist drama in a near-future Gotham with an edge of social commentary to it could be a lot of fun.
Batman: The Golden Streets of Gotham
Hey, did you know that there was an Elseworlds story were the Waynes were instead working class Polish immigrants, and following the deaths of Bruno Vanekow's parents in an analogue of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Bruno became a combination of Robin Hood-ish thief who steals from the capitalist class to help the poor they exploited AND travelled the country championing worker's rights?
Arguably one of the most removed from the original Batman concept, but a fun read all the same, also one of the most explicitly socialist Batman comics out there, with Selina Kyle in this setting (here the daughter of the mayor) adopting the Catwoman disguise so she could help establish union within early 20th century Gotham's working class.
Frankly it's kind of amusing that this book even exists in the first place, but the idea of it being turned into a mini-series amuses me greatly.
The Batman in... Nine Lives
Now, there are two prominent Elseworlds that are intended as homages to the noir genre, one being this book and the other being Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips' Batman: Gotham Noir, but while I like both of them, Nine Lives edges the other out as while both feature members of the Bat Family as private investigators, Nine Lives' Dick Grayson as a snarky PI is a concept that's a lot of fun to read while Gotham Noir's Jim Gordon as a depressed divorced alcoholic shaken by PTSD from his fighting in the Second World War is... compelling but considerably less so?
Here Dick is still a former circus kid and ex-cop, working as a private investigator when he gets drain into the investigation of the death of local nightclub owner Selina Kyle. Everyone is played more as a conventional noir mystery stock character (Edward Nygma is a corrupt accountant, for example), which makes Bruce's appearance as Batman all the more intentionally jarring as we're seeing him from the perspective of a version of Dick who hadn't met him until he was an adult.
Annoyingly I believe the original book is both out of print and not available digitally to my knowledge, but a murder mystery show starring a PI version of Dick Grayson could be a lot of fun I feel, even if its a genre that appeals very much to just me specifically.
