When a franchise goes big, you have two choices for what to do next. You can zoom out and reveal the wider context of the original story, or you can zoom in and spotlight a story that has lower stakes. This latter approach is high-risk, high-reward, but it could serve to completely redefine the entire property.
Take, for example, the DC Universe. For every lower-stakes show like The Penguin that rakes in awards, there’s something like Powerless, a strange genre-bending series that has a fun premise (superhero workplace sitcom!) but is now in the dustbin of history.
