'DC's Legends of Tomorrow' Showrunners Talk Tone, Anthology Format

We've seen plenty of information about DC's Legends of Tomorrow thus far, and the creative minds behind the show have recently spoken about the tone of the series, and also dropped the news that this will be an anthology!

Showrunner Phil Klemmer spoke to Screen Rant and revealed where the tone of the show lies on the spectrum of the darker Arrow and lighter The Flash. "Ours will definitely be a little closer to [The Flash]," Klemmer said. "It’s more like a caper, because it’s sort of like Ocean’s 11, where you have a team of misfits, a dirty dozen, and they’ve been sent on essentially a suicide mission."

So it will be a light show, but it will also have some dark moments. "At a certain point, we will have darkness emerge and characters will betray one another and be tempted by the dark side," Klemmer said. "And others might not make it along for the full trip. And others might be lost in weird time periods.”

Arrow and The Flash are serialized shows, but it seems Legends of Tomorrow will take a different approach. “It’s an anthology show," Klemmer said. "This is not designed to go forever. This season is meant to be standalone." So it seems that the spinoff will follow a format similar to True Detective and American Horror Story. This of course assumes the spinoff gets renewed for Season 2.

Executive producer Marc Guggenheim further explained how the anthology format could affect the show down the road. "The way we think of it is each arc, each season is its own separate movie," Guggenheim said. "What we want to do is have each separate movie have its own identity. So almost to the point where each season was telling one big story that you could sort of subtitle, like the way you do subtitle American Horror Story, if that makes sense."