[@Member 00492] Thank you, the Gotham info is most useful.

[@Demon Shinobi] I think the setup for Batman Beyond was very good. An inexperienced Batman with a great deal of raw talent but no training apprenticed to the elderly Batman who's got a massive amount of training but in his age his talent is severely faded. The problem was that as a result of meddling, attempting to make the show more kid friendly and sort of a lack of overall direction Terry almost completely stagnated. You set up a character that has much to learn but shows promise and you've got a great foundation. Unfortunately Terry never seemed to actually learn that much that he was missing. The first season was gold but the second season sort of started to fall apart. Basically as Member 00492 said Terry is inexperienced to give Bruce a purpose but in the second season because Bruce was dark and brooding and not very kid friendly his function was almost entirely taken over by Max. That function however in the long run should have become irrelevant as Terry grew into his own as Batman. The result was that you went from Terry learning the tricks of the trade from the extremely experienced and gifted Bruce Wayne to Terry being too stupid to grasp basic principles that his mildly gifted friend then had to do for him.

The show also in an effort to become more appealing to kids focused way too much on Terry's high school. The chronology of seasons 2 and 3 are all messed up because if they each represented a year he should have graduated awhile ago. They had lame episodes like "Terry's Friend Dates a Robot" and "Hidden Agenda". Some crime focused around the school makes sense particularly stories like Willie Watt, a suppressed nerd finds a dangerous way to lash out, or the Venom episodes which makes even more sense as high school athletes are a huge part of the steroid clientele. It just seemed like they were reaching further and further and further to make things tie back to Hamilton Hill High which seemed both improbable and kind of boring.

Don't get me wrong the later seasons had some excellent episodes such as the second appearance of Shriek which highlighted really well the growth of Terry as Batman and his relationship with Bruce but the problem was the growth wasn't shown in previous episodes and seemed to disappear in following ones until it was suddenly there again like in "The Call" which made Terry feel kind of inconsistent. It sort of reached a point where the show wasn't capable of both being what it was as a Batman story and appealing to the target audience with what the suits thought they would like. Not surprising it got axed. A real shame to, had amazing potential.

I'm sort of hoping that a Batman Beyond show makes it into the CW's network of DCTV (preferably with writers that aren't spread quite as thin since Flash, Supergirl and Legends are suffering from the lack of specific focus) but given their odd instance on avoiding anything directly referencing Batman I rather doubt it'll actually happen.