Under the current model, new episodes of Stargirl premiere on DC Universe on Mondays before airing (in lightly edited form) on The CW on Tuesday nights. Variety reports that Stargirl’s ratings on Tuesday nights are consistent with other Arrowverse offerings, an encouraging sign, as this show is a delight. Stargirl was conceived and produced as a DC Universe original, along the lines of other high profile live action efforts like Titans, Swamp Thing, and Doom Patrol. But of those shows, Swamp Thing saw its episode order cut during production (and was canceled before the first episode even hit the service), and Doom Patrol now appears simultaneously on DC Universe and HBO Max. Stargirl becoming a CW original would appear to be another troubling sign for the superhero-friendly streaming service, which also features a library of tens of thousands of DC Comics. Of course, there’s another problem with this news: Stargirl has been a considerable departure from the usual Arrowverse formulae, both in terms of the structure and format of its writing and its superior production values. While Stargirl season 2 is really great news, I have to wonder if the quality will suffer as it becomes just another piece of the puzzle for the already superhero heavy network. What’s more, many of the episodes that air on DC Universe are slightly longer than the ones that air on the CW, since the streaming service doesn’t have to take commercials into account with its run times. As long as they don’t turn Stargirl into the kind of 22 episode season favored by The Flash and Supergirl, two shows that would benefit from the kind of shorter seasons we’ve seen on DC Universe, this should all work out ok.
