Series A good series, for CW.
I am not a huge fan of the CW, but this show is great. With a good story that feels like a comic book storyline, characters that are well rounded and fleshed out, and awesome fight scenes, this show impressed me. I was expecting the usual CW crap, but instead, I found a new favorite tv show. Great Job DC, you did something Marvel never could. Make a great TV series.
Series Make this the DC version of the MCU!
With both Arrow and The Flash, DC has shown they can do TV in the modern day very well. Their movies on the other hand, highly debatable. Arrow is extremely well written, has few flaws, and I rarely don't want to watch. Let Marvel win in the theaters. DC has won in the living room.
Series Aims High And Rarely Misses
Oliver Queen is a nauseatingly rich, but incredibly immature playboy who becomes a no-nonsense vigilante trying to clean up Star(ling) City after returning from five years stranded on an island. The show takes the interesing format of concurrently showcasing a year of Ollie's life back home and the corresponding year on the island, effectively moving us closer to the Oliver he is in the present. Past Oliver's hair is unkempt and messy, he's bratty and whiny and noticeably speaks at a higher pitch. Walking the viewer through the journey brings us that much closer to him.
To say nothing of the real meat and potatoes of the show. In the present, Oliver is quickly joined by an inner circle of partners who back him up. In spite of the hacker of the group's tendency to be a technological wizard in every sense of the word, they manage to make his Arrow Cave feel like a second home.
The first season dealt with Oliver trying to make amends as "The Hood". Using his father's little black book and crossing off the names in order to clean up the city. The twists and turns are well thought out and the ending is satisfying; a somewhat underwhelming final battle not included.
As of this writing, the show is half way through its second season, ending with a backdoor pilot that was never intended to be anything subtler than transparent with bright neon lights flashing through it. The second season mined the comics more for a decidedly deadlier villain, but missteps some when several characters are soap opera'd in by means of not quite dead. Overall, season two manages to be more enjoyably than its predecessor.
Personally, I was a fan of Green Arrow before the show, and though I may not have been intricately knowledgeable about the decades of lore he has, I caught all the surface-level nods to the fans throughout. It's the little bones the creators throw that makes the meal delicious, so to speak, whether you recognize the flavor or not.
Series Train Wreck
I want to start by saying that I loved the first two seasons of Arrow. The characters were awesome, the stories were good and the fights were amazing. Some hits and misses, but overall I loved it. And then Season 3 happened. It started by shoving the badass heroine Canary into the fridge, followed by a mystery arc on who her killer could be, which, surprise surprise, turned out to be Season 1 Big Bad Malcolm Merlyn, who Ollie puts under his protection for no reason. This leads into an entire season of bad decisions as the heroes make stupid move after stupid move all to protect a mass murdering terrorist. Even in the episode Nanda Parbat, where the situation resolves itself, the heroes still insist on screwing everything up to protect a Complete Monster. Malcolm Merlyn is a perfect example of how a Villain Sue can drag down an entire show. He's an easily forgiven Creator's Pet and this has resulted in every character in the show becoming an idiot who have devoted themselves to protecting him. This has turned the entire show into a trainwreck. There is no way the show can recover from the damage that Season 3 has done to it.