So is Gotham worth watching? S1 is on Netflix soon.
Not really. I watched the whole first season for some reason, but I have no intentions of watching season two. I think the show would have been fine if it had just focused on the mob families and police corruption, but I guess they felt like the had to shoe-horn in every villain, major or minor, in Batman's rogues gallery. The problem with that is that it's logically inconsistent with the Batman mythos, which basically flat-out states that Batman's existence is what created most of his villains. Seeing many of them created when Bruce Wayne is a little kid just feels lame, and it doesn't help that almost all the villains are terrible and hammy. The show tries to be dark, but it usually just feels cheesy. The fact that we have to see Bruce Wayne and Catwoman as kids is painful and forced. No one wants to see Bruce Wayne as a kid unless he's watching his parents die in a flashback, and even then we've seen that about six hundred times by now.
Season two is subtitled Rise of the Villains, which is further evidence that they absolutely do not get Batman.
As I've stated before, if they wanted to do a Gotham cop show, the show should have taken place in a Gotham where Batman exists, but isn't the focal point of the show. He might show up occasionally, and they could show the building of his relationship with Jim Gordon, but the cops would be the star of the show. I think it would have been a unique perspective, watching these ordinary cops trying to deal with the craziness that Batman has effectively unleashed on their city. They could also have just focused on the mob and the cops in a pre-Batman timeline.
Or they could have just made a fucking awesome Batman TV show and kept it in a separate universe from the films. You know, exactly what they're doing with the Flash.
The cast isn't awful. Donal Logue as Harvey Bullock is awesome, but he's awesome in everything. The guy who plays Gordon is uninspiring. Most of the villains overact the fuck out of their parts, although Jada Pinkett Smith is fun enough when she chews scenery. I also like the guy who plays Falcone, but he's a Wire alum, so that was a given.
So no...I would not recommend Gotham. It just feels like a waste of time. If you haven't seen Arrow, Flash, or Daredevil, go watch those instead. They're all much, much better. And more importantly, the people writing them seem to get the characters.