Both reviews include extensive plot summary so beware of spoilers. However, they are both on the pilot episodes so even with spoilers, it's all need-to-know information if you want to get into the show(s)!
Beauty and the Beast
Even though this show premiered second, I watched it first because I thought it was sure to be the better of the two shows. I had no really no intention of watching this show originally. I love the Disney movie of my childhood and the Once Upon a Time interpretation of the story, so I was pretty content with where the fairy tale laid in my eyes. Plus, seeing advertisements of a not-so-ugly beast really made the show come off as just another crappy CW melodrama.
Until I actually read up on the plot... The show was to take a new angle on the tale as old as time. This beauty was more than a damsel in distress - she was actually an NYPD detective who comes across a man who saved her life ten years earlier. She learns that he was part of a failed military experiment that has left him (hardly) deformed and will super human powers. He has faked his own death so they don't come after him and he needs her help to stay hidden. Wow! A Beauty and the Beast story where she helps save him as much as he saves her? That doesn't sound so bad.
I was wrong.
The story has so many flaws, I'm not even sure where to begin. First of all, for a crime drama, the cops' actions just don't really make sense. While solving the opening mystery, they jump to a ridiculous number of arbitrary conclusions. My favorite is when they find a pregnancy test in a public area of the victim's workplace and assume she is pregnant even though this doesn't come up in the autopsy and they mention that it should have. You'd think that would be a flag that test belonged to someone else... The main character's actions are just so off the charts, that it was borderline ridiculous. She gets a search warrant for a building and then goes without her partner. There she finds a man that is supposed to be dead who is the only suspect as his fingerprints were at the crime scene and does not arrest him because he had a news article about her mother's death and more or less asked her not to. Then, there is a scene where she is attacked on a subway platform that inexplicably has no one there besides herself and the attackers. Despite this, the beast is there and saves her life again, killing three people. They both flee the scene even though she is a cop and could easily be linked back to the crime in about 20 different ways.
This pilot just completely baffled me. This was some of the worst, hole-filled writing I have ever seen. The show took a pretty cool sounding premise and destroyed it by not being thoughtful in the writing. With so many popular crime shows on TV, it's so easy to see how many problems there are with the logic in this show. The whole thing seemed incredibly rushed and I need a bit more effort so this was definitely the first and last episode of Beauty and the Beast for me.
Arrow
I almost didn't even want to watch this after the last one. However, I figured I should at least give the pilot a chance... and I'm so glad I did.
The story starts off with Oliver Queen, a ship wrecked billionaire, using a flaming arrow to light a fire and signal the ship that will save him from the island he is stranded on. You quickly learn he has been stranded for five years and his father died in the accident that left him deserted. The doctor that inspects him correctly foreshadows that this Oliver has likely been changed by the island where he has lived for so long.
Throughout the episode, Oliver has flashbacks to the shipwreck which teach the viewer that Oliver's father was involved in some shady dealings when he ran the Queen company. He wants Oliver to survive the crash in order to fix the corruption that he started and then takes his own life so that Ollie can use the supplies to survive. It is clear that there are still many gaps about what else Oliver learned during the wreck and on the island and hopefully the show continues to use flash backs to fill in this information.
Now back home with his wealth and resources, Oliver is able to set up a secret base that he can use to create high tech weapons and set up powerful computer systems that he can use to track down evil and corrupt criminals in order to restore justice to society using primarily arrows.
If you think this sounds just like Batman meets Robin Hood - you pretty much nailed it.
I really love super hero movies, but wasn't an avid comic book reader so I knew just about nothing about Arrow going into this show. I figured the character was just the DC version of Hawkeye and that wasn't terribly far off. What I wasn't expecting was an archer version of Batman. However, I really like Batman so I'm okay with that. I'm excited to see where this show goes. They set up a lot in this pilot. There are many avenues to go down for future villains, recurring villains, deeper back story, future side kicks, and potential love interests. The writing gives a lot of information in the pilot while barely scraping the surface and I'm very excited to keep watching.
Arrow is on Wednesdays at 8pm and Beauty and the Beast is Thursdays at 9pm. Both shows are on the CW.
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