New 'Arrow' TV Promo Arrives: The Return Of Oliver Queen

On Oct. 10, Oliver Queen comes home.

The CW takes its third stab at a DC Universe mainstay when the Green Arrow adaptation "Arrow" makes its freshman debut at 8 p.m. ET/PT, and the network is clearly ready to start ramping up the hype.

When wealthy industrialist Oliver Queen (played here by Stephen Amell) is rescued from shipwrecked isolation on a desert island, he returns home with a renewed purpose to combat corruption. In secret, he tunes his body to physical perfection and develops an arsenal of trick arrows and expert marksmanship.

Though it's not picking up the recurring "Smallville" Green Arrow saga, that's historically where the character first emerged upon The CW's radar in 2006. Writers simply needed someone to fill in when The CW couldn't secure television-depiction rights to Batman for the Superman origin series, so the Green Arrow was worked in, played by Justin Hartley in ultimately more than 70 episodes.

The look of the series is fine. It's a toned-down update of a hero whose arsenal of arrows and even dialogue was sometimes laughably corny and over-the-top. What remains to be seen will be how the hardest-to-please of audiences embraces the series. Sometimes, canon can be everything and alterations for adaptation can be a tightrope walk.

Still, there's one thing "Arrow" has going for it: it would be difficult for even the most ill-conceived of adaptations to be more under-whelming than the time the network briefly tried the Batman off-shoot "Birds of Prey." Sheesh.