Arrow Executive Producers Preview Season 4

The fourth season of Arrow premieres in less than a week – Wednesday, October 7 on The CW – and we just got back from a screening of the season opener that preceded a Q&A with the show’s Executive Producers, Marc Guggenheim and Wendy Mericle.

Spoiler warning: The premiere is quite good, and in it, “Team Arrow” is quickly brought together after there’s a major threat to what is now called Star City. There’s a lot of teamwork… but there’s still a fracture between Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) and John Diggle (David Ramsey), which will be dealt with very early on.

“We’re going to resolve that. It’s something that we wanted to explore, seeing them at odds, and really honoring what Oliver did at the end of Season Three, which was pretty egregious,” Wendy Mericle says of the Oliver-Diggle conflict. “It’s going to take some time, but they will get back on the same track,” she promises.

Part of what might bring the team back together is Oliver’s new approach as Star City’s hero — he is no longer the Arrow, he is the Green Arrow, and since the Arrow is considered dead, maybe the new hero will be better received by the people.

“We’re hoping that this will be a change in that they will embrace him, but it’s not going to be easy,” Mericle says. “We can’t make it easy for him. But it’s speaking to him trying to be more of an inspiration and less of the judge, jury, and executioner that we’ve seen in the past,” she teases.

The Green Arrow name change was always in the cards for the series. “We were always very upfront, I think, about our intention that this was an origin story, and we are very deliberate in our choice of ‘he’s not the Arrow, he’s the Hood at first,’ and then he becomes the Arrow, and eventually, he was going to become the Green Arrow. We didn’t have a specific season in mind, as to when it would happen, but certainly, for us, it felt very organic to make this the season that he’d be Green Arrow. Certainly, we’ve been developing… if you look at Laurel’s trajectory… we always said, we were headed towards her becoming Black Canary. There’s just been a slow, organic incorporation of the comic book elements,” Marc Guggenheim explains, before assuring that there is no checklist dictating what they do.

“We don’t ever bring in the comic book elements just to bring in comic book elements,” he assures. “We don’t sit here with a checklist. I think a lot of fans think that we’ve got a checklist of the comic book tropes, like the chili, and the jokes, and the romance with Black Canary, and go ‘okay, we’ve got that, we’ve got that, we’ve got that.’ It’s really just like we’ve got the comics in the back of our mind… we know where we’re headed with the character. The comic books are there as inspiration, but not as a to-do list.”

And speaking of the Black Canary, Mericle assures that Laurel’s alter ego is now the “full-fledged” Black Canary who will be a crucial part of the team going forward — and that’s not all that will be happening for her. “The overarching theme of the season is about family, and chosen family versus blood family, and she’s going to be dealing not just with Sara coming back, but also with her family on the team, and also with her dad,” she promises.

We will see Felicity Smoak’s mother Donna in Season 4, and the producers also hope to reveal some more information about Felicity’s dad at some point. “I think Felicity’s dad remains that topic — we were talking about it in the room yesterday. We’re always talking about it. But, again, we have to find the right story and the right moment. I guess we trust our own process, that it will come to us when it’s meant to come to us… just like with the comics, we don’t sit there with a checklist. We don’t sit there with a list of cards we want to turn over; we have a deck of cards that we know we can turn over, but it’s about finding the right moment, not just doing it to do it,” Guggenheim explains.

Arrow Season 4 begins Wednesday, October 7 on The CW. Take a look at some preview images from the season premiere at GreenArrowTV!