McKenzie is the real hero of 'Gotham'

A young, lithe woman with catlike moves steals a half-gallon of milk to feed a feline friend.

A bespectacled police technician named Ed Nygma is chided for his love of riddles.

Mob toughs ridicule their young cohort with the pointed nose and the bow tie and call him a penguin.

Subtle, “Gotham” is not.

The most anticipated show of the fall season begins at 7 p.m. Monday, Sept. 22, on Fox, and if it wants to keep the huge audience that will almost certainly watch the first episode, it needs to stop patronizing its audience and play to the considerable strengths of its premise and its star.

The premise: The struggle between the hard-boiled detectives of Gotham City and its colorful villains before Bruce Wayne grows up to be Batman.

The star: Ben McKenzie, that hard-nosed actor with a heart of gold who has been the best thing about shows that are both underseen (NBC and TNT's grim cop drama “Southland”) and underappreciated (Fox's teen soap “The O.C.”).

McKenzie plays James Gordon, an idealistic detective whom we know better as the older, wiser Commissioner Gordon of the Batman comics, TV shows and movies. New to the Gotham force, Jim is paired with an older, jaded partner named Harvey Bullock, not to be confused with District Attorney Harvey Dent, one of Batman's most famous villains.

Bullock (a way over-the-top Donal Logue) tries to pass Jim's first big case off to another division, but Jim wants to help the young boy left behind when billionaires Thomas and Martha Wayne are gunned down in a Gotham alley. McKenzie's emotional scene with the 12-year-old Bruce Wayne (David Mazouz of “Touch”) is the unquestionable highlight of the show's first hour.

Unfortunately, the pilot, written by “Rome” and “Mentalist” alum Bruno Heller, mostly leans on comic-book tropes instead of delivering actual human drama. Perhaps that's to be expected; this is a show called “Gotham,” after all.

But then again, countless comic-book adaptations have taught us to expect more, whether it's the bleak dystopia of “The Walking Dead,” the lovable characters in Marvel's cinematic universe, or the grit and grandeur of Christopher Nolan's “Dark Knight” trilogy.

“Gotham” feels like it would have been a wonderful companion series to The CW's “Smallville” — which premiered 13 years ago. It's facile, disposable fun more content to wink at the audience than to make them feel something. There's certainly an audience for that given how self-important those last three Batman movies could get, and I'm not sure if I'm in it.

Of course, I could be singing a different tune after “Gotham” gets a few months under its belt and finds its voice. It would be a shame to squander such massive potential.

• Sean Stangland is a Daily Herald copy editor and a tireless consumer of pop culture. You can follow him on Twitter at @SeanStanglandDH.