Super Dads

How Two Broadway Veterans Helped The Flash Become One of the Best Family Dramas on Television

Jesse L. Martin and Victor Garber on their unlikely foray into the world of superheroes.
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Courtesy of The CW.

When Parenthood ended its six-season run on NBC earlier this year, it seemed like the end of an era for a familiar TV staple: the network family drama. Friday Night Lights and My So-Called Life are in the past, and while shows like ABC Family’s The Fosters, HBO’s Togetherness, and Hulu’s Casual picked up the torch, the networks seemed to have stepped out the game. And then . . . Enter the CW. The network once associated with teen soaps and supernatural adventures delivered top-notch family dramas last year in both the telenovela-tinged Jane the Virgin and The Flash. What’s that? The Flash? You thought that was just another superhero show? Think again.

Executive producer Greg Berlanti is no stranger to the family drama, as a veteran of Brothers & Sisters and Everwood, and he’s now bringing that familial vibe to the youth-oriented superhero boom. On CBS, Berlanti’s Supergirl is all about sisters, mothers, and aunts, while The Flash has father figures coming out of the woodwork for our speedy hero Barry Allen (Grant Gustin). There’s Harrison Wells (Tom Cavanagh), Jay Garrick (Teddy Sears), Henry Allen (John Wesley Shipp, a.k.a. the original Flash, a.k.a. the dad on Berlanti’s old show Dawson’s Creek), Dr. Martin Stein (Victor Garber), and, most crucially for the show’s success, Detective Joe West, played by Broadway veteran Jesse L. Martin of Rent fame.

“I actually have a job because they decided to do something different in the TV show than in the comics,” Martin says about his entirely show-created character who is raising both adopted son Barry and the object of Barry’s affection, Joe’s biological daughter Iris West (Candice Patton). “I knew that I would be doing a lot of parenting on the show. I just didn't know what the effect would be on us as actors, on the show in general, and on the audience. We've gotten to do some really amazing things as far as fathers and sons, and fathers and daughters.” And for all the paternal energy happening on The Flash, Berlanti’s new show, Supergirl, is all about sisters, mothers, and aunts.

There’s a long-standing tradition of orphans and adopted fathers in superhero comics. And to a certain degree, Joe West is picking up the mantle of Pa Kent and, to a certain degree, Batman’s butler, Alfred. But while Barry—who spent the first season trying to figure out who killed his mom—certainly has that dead parent wound that helps form so many superheroes, no foster parent in comics history has been quite as lovingly hands-on as Joe West.

As a law-enforcement officer, Joe is often part of the superheroic adventures and, as an everyman and audience proxy, Martin is regularly saddled with asking the science-savvy Flash whiz kids to slow down and explain everything to him. “It's my role, I'm the guy that doesn’t know, and has to be told,” Martin agrees, saying we shouldn’t expect him to ever shed his Average Joe role. Will Joe ever get powers of his own? “I was told that I never would,” Martin said, with some relief.

But the Joe role serves a much more important narrative function. As any Flash viewer will tell you, there’s a moment in nearly every episode where Joe has a heart-to-heart with a younger character that inspires tears in the show’s devoted audience. (Sound familiar, Parenthood fans?) Now that Earth 1’s Harrison Wells has been unmasked as a bad guy, Joe has taken his protégés Cisco (Carlos Valdes) and Caitlin (Danielle Panabaker) under his wing, making him a father figure for pretty much everyone on the show. “I’ve been doing this thing for a long time, so I have an emotional tool box to work with,” Martin says of his ability to make viewers cry. Martin says he’s even inspired some tears on set: “I just had a moment yesterday where I was having a heart-to-heart with Barry, and our camera man just completely teared up. It was really kind of amazing.”

Asked if he had a name for the tear-soaked scenes, Martin suggested we call them “Joe-ments.” If you strip away the meta-humans and speed-force mumbo jumbo of The Flash, what remains, Martin says, is a drama that resembles The Waltons or The Cosby Show. Martin will get the chance to further flex his dad skills when Joe’s long-lost son, Wally West, joins the cast later this season. Comic-book readers will recognize the significance of that name—and non–comic-book readers should expect The Flash family to get even speedier.

If Martin is the ultimate father figure in the Berlanti comic-book empire, then what does that make Broadway veteran Victor Garber? “I would say grandfather,” the actor jokes. Garber started appearing on The Flash last season as comic-book character Dr. Martin Stein, and one half of the superhero force known as Firestorm. Though Garber wasn’t originally hired for a regular role, he’s since been asked to help lead the upcoming spin-off show Legends of Tomorrow, which co-stars other familiar faces from the Flash and Arrow universe like Caity Lotz’s White Canary, Wentworth Miller’s Captain Cold, and Brandon Routh’s Atom.

Garber may be familiar to genre fans for playing a famous TV dad to Jennifer Garner on Alias, but the actor has an established stage pedigree that stretches back to the early and original productions of Godspell, Sweeney Todd, and Noises Off. So what inspired a veteran song-and-dance man to enlist in a superhero ensemble show? “I can be very flippant because my first response is: money,” Garber says before replying more seriously. “I realized that this is an opportunity to do something that I rarely would be asked to do, at this age and stage in my life. I thought, Why not shake it up and put myself out there and do a new thing?”

But Garber couldn’t possibly have known the reaction he would inspire in whole new generation of fans when he signed on to play Firestorm. “The responses I get when I go out on the street. Everyone’s very excited about it, and they say, ‘Wait, you’re Firestorm!’ Honestly, I am shocked at how many people have said that, walking down the street. And I don't mean just kids. I mean, men in their 40s. It’s undeniably pervasive, this whole thing.” Before The Flash, he says, he usually only got shouted at in the Theater District.

Garber and Martin may be the elder statesmen of the set—“Yes, you see a deference in people’s eyes because I’ve been around so long, and I’m older,” Garber says—but they’re both quick to praise their young co-stars, sounding not unlike proud fathers. “The kid has skills to pay the bills,” Martin says of his on-screen son Grant Gustin. Garber praises Franz Drameh, who plays the new other half of Firestorm (for now), Jefferson Jackson. “I wasn’t sure what the dynamic would be, but everyone is on the same page with different experience,” he continues. “That’s what makes it tolerable, because it’s a really hard show and the hours are insane.”

And the kids are rubbing off on Garber, too; he’s recently joined social media, both in order to keep up with his new fan base and to promote his work with the diabetes charity Beyond Type 1. “My friends are shocked,” Garber says. His role in the organization echoes his on-screen persona. Garber, who developed Type 1 diabetes when he was 12, says he hopes to “support people and young children who feel like their life is over, because of it, because it’s a very traumatic thing to happen.”

Both veteran actors have entered an unexpected chapter in their careers, and we’re luckier for it. As Martin points out, without the heart of family drama to anchor it, The Flash was in danger of getting lost in the glut of superhero entertainment. “I think it’s key to the success of our show. Yes, we have some of the best special effects on TV, that rival some movies, even. We have some of the best characters, but those little moments, they sew the whole thing together. If we didn't have those little moments, if we didn't have the actors that could do those little moments, I think our show would be dead in the water.”