5 Superhero Shows That Have Aged Like Fine Wine

While superhero movies didn’t really take off until the 2010s, when the Marvel Cinematic Universe reshaped the blockbuster landscape, comic book crimefighters have always been a staple of television. In the 1950s, George Reeves played Superman. In the 1960s, Adam West played Batman. In the 1970s, Bill Bixby played the Incredible Hulk. There are a lot more superheroes on the small screen now than there were in the 20th century — every year, Disney+ seems to churn out more superhero shows than we used to get in a decade — but there are some timeless classics that still hold up today.

West’s old Batman show is still just as much fun 60 years later, and classic cartoons like X-Men: The Animated Series just keep getting better. There have also been more recent gems, like Netflix’s dark, gritty Daredevil show or HBO’s dark, gritty Watchmen show, that have stood the test of time after a decade. Since the stories rely on predictable tropes and the special effects get dated fast, not a lot of superhero shows hold up after a few years. But these shows are aging like a fine wine.

5 Batman

Adam West’s live-action Batman TV series from the 1960s is so far removed from the dark, gritty, edgy Batmen of Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder and Matt Reeves that it hardly feels like the same character. But the goofy, campy, colorful, lighthearted approach to the West show defined the Caped Crusader for an entire generation. West was the most ubiquitous image of the Dark Knight until Michael Keaton came along two decades later.

At the time, Batman was a snapshot of the ‘60s (the radical fashion, the tongue-in-cheek humor, the freewheeling attitudes), but today, that show feels like a breath of fresh air. As great as Nolan and Reeves’ movies are, it could be argued that the more realistic you make Batman — the more realistic you make a billionaire dressing up as a bat to fight crime — the more ridiculous that whole concept really seems.

West’s TV show went the other way. He recognized the absurdity of a bat-themed vigilante, and he leaned into that absurdity. Between dance sequences, a laundry list of eccentric character actors, and sight gags ripped straight from a cartoon, the ‘60s Batman TV show is a ton of fun, and still holds up today.

4 Daredevil

The first time Daredevil was adapted into a lavish, big-budget Hollywood production, it was a complete and utter disaster. Ben Affleck’s Daredevil movie bombed at the box office, got eviscerated by critics, and worst of all, got this iconic character all wrong. A little over a decade later, Netflix finally got it right.

The original Netflix Daredevil series feels like a Frank Miller comic come to life; it’s dark and violent and twisted. After Affleck had totally fumbled the character (and didn’t have much to work with in the first place), Charlie Cox proved to be the perfect casting to play Matt Murdock. Cox really captured the pain and darkness that Matt is grappling with, and he went toe-to-toe with an equally well-cast Vincent D’Onofrio as one of TV’s most terrifying villains, Wilson Fisk.

Daredevil’s initial three-season run has all the comic book spectacle you could ask for — including some of the greatest fight scenes on television — but it also has the grit and nuance and compulsive plotting of a prestige TV crime drama. Superhero shows don’t get much better than Daredevil (and we’ve seen evidence of that as Disney has struggled to continue Daredevil itself).

3 X-Men: The Animated Series

X-Men: The Animated Series is the gold standard for superhero cartoons. It’s an intoxicating blend of comic book action and soapy melodrama, bringing in more than enough action to satisfy comic book readers but also digging deep enough into the characters’ lives to feel like a worthwhile, emotionally compelling story. It has all the superpowered spectacle and eye-popping action set-pieces you could hope for, but it balances them out with poignant interpersonal drama between the characters.

The show is as much about the human beings underneath the colorful costumes as it is about their superhero alter egos. X-Men: The Animated Series has all the fun of its source material, but, much like the source material, it also takes its characters seriously, and treats them as real people with real problems. The voice actors ably bring these characters to life, ripping them straight off the page and imbuing them with so much depth and charm and personality.

Disney+’s recent revival, X-Men ’97, is a rare example of a reboot that actually understands what made the original series work, and how to recapture it. X-Men ’97 recreates the original show’s captivating blend of superhero smackdowns and tearjerking tragedies to incredible effect.

2 Watchmen

Alan Moore’s Watchmen is one of the most acclaimed and influential comic books ever published. It radically reinvented the superhero genre, and created a whole new subgenre deconstructing the usual tropes with a dark sense of realism. And after we’ve seen The Boys and Invincible and The Incredibles, Watchmen remains the quintessential superhero satire.

When Zack Snyder set out to adapt Watchmen into a movie, it was considered a bold move. But when Damon Lindelof decided to go off-book and write his own sequel to the original comic in the form of a limited series, it seemed truly insane. Watchmen is one of those seminal works you don’t even bother to try to adapt in its original form, let alone embellish in a new form.

But against all odds, Watchmen turned out to be one of HBO’s best miniseries, and a worthy successor to Moore’s book. HBO’s Watchmen replicates the source material’s conceit of mixing superheroes into real American history, but swaps out the Vietnam War for the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. It’s just as pointed a piece of social commentary as the original comic, and feels just as fresh and exciting within the stale superhero genre.

1 Batman: The Animated Series

While the ’60s Batman show is a really fun representation of that character, Batman: The Animated Series is arguably the truest. Batman: The Animated Series combined all the best parts of all the best Batmen — the detective-noir grit of Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s original vision, the gloomy badassery of Frank Miller and Alan Moore’s seminal comics, and the gothic visual style and chilling cinematic atmosphere (and Danny Elfman theme) of Tim Burton’s movies — to give us the definitive on-screen portrait of the Dark Knight.

Kevin Conroy is the ultimate Batman actor — brooding, angry, grizzled, and hiding a deep well of pain behind a stoic facade — and Mark Hamill is one of the best Jokers, channeling the eccentric theatricality of Cesar Romero and the genuine menace of Jack Nicholson. Batman: The Animated Series gave us iconic takes on well-worn characters, like the Penguin, and even introduced a brand-new villain who became an integral part of the Bat’s rogues’ gallery: one Harley Quinn.

Batman: The Animated Series is easily the best Batman show ever made, it might be the best superhero show ever made, and I’d even argue it ranks alongside Breaking Bad and Chernobyl and The Wire as one of the greatest TV series of all time. While its superheroic peers have come and gone, Batman: The Animated Series hasn’t aged a day.