DC Crime Turns the Spotlight on Jimmy Olsen – With Gorilla Grodd as the First Case

DC Studios and HBO Max are developing DC Crime, a mock-doc true-crime series that hands the mic to The Daily Planet’s most perpetually curious staffer: Jimmy Olsen, played by Skyler Gisondo. The project reunites the sharp minds behind American Vandal – Tony Yacenda and Dan Perrault – who serve as writers, executive producers, and showrunners. James Gunn and Peter Safran executive produce alongside DC Studios, with Galen Vaisman overseeing production for Warner Bros. Television. It’s an unexpected pitch on paper, but it makes a surprising amount of sense once you imagine Metropolis through the lens of a newsroom investigation rather than a cape-and-catchphrase spectacle.

The format is the hook. Season 1 will reportedly unfold like a prestige true-crime doc, hosted and framed by Jimmy himself, as he chases leads, cross-checks sources, and gets in way over his head – because of course he does. The subject? Gorilla Grodd, the telepathic, hyper-intelligent, super-strong ape who’s tangled with The Flash since his 1959 debut in The Flash #106. Grodd’s blend of brute force and mind games is tailor-made for a docu-style slow burn: witness interviews compromised by psychic manipulation, red-string maps that literally fight back, experts debating whether “mens rea” means anything when the suspect can rewrite your memory on the fly.

Choosing Jimmy as our guide isn’t a gimmick; it’s a statement. Recent screen incarnations proved he can be more than comedic relief – Gisondo’s take has been praised for balancing warmth, timing, and plot relevance – while the comics have long used Jimmy as a portal into the stranger corners of the DC universe. Lest we forget, Jack Kirby’s first salvos of the New Gods mythos exploded not in a marquee Superman title but in Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen. Put differently: when DC wants to get weird and world-expanding, Jimmy has receipts.

Grodd, meanwhile, arrives with bona fides. He’s appeared across decades of animation – from Super Friends to Justice League, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, and Harley Quinn – and even popped up for a cameo in Creature Commandos. He’s routinely cited among top comic book villains for a reason: he combines physical menace with telepathy and telekinesis, turning every conversation into a chess match and every action scene into psychological warfare. In a documentary framing, Grodd’s powers become narrative tools – unreliable narrators, corrupted files, missing time stamps, even interviews where the subtitles start contradicting the audio.

Of course, some fans bristle at a Superman-less Superman offshoot. The industry has a mixed history with capeless spin-offs; comparisons to Gotham versus the decade-long run of Smallville surface quickly. But the creative calculus here is different. Instead of teasing the absence of a hero, DC Crime centers a journalistic process. It’s not asking the audience to wait for a cape; it’s promising the dopamine hit of discovery: the lead that pans out, the theory that collapses, the taped call that blows the case open. If Yacenda and Perrault apply the same forensic joke-craft and structural rigor they brought to American Vandal, expect an earnest parody of true crime that still respects facts, victims, and consequences within a super-powered city.

There’s also strategic upside. A Jimmy-hosted anthology can roam: Grodd in season one, perhaps a corporate-backed meta-human scandal next, or a street-level mystery that ropes in rival newsrooms. It creates space for cameos – yes, from Daily Planet colleagues and maybe even speedsters – without depending on them. And it spotlights a part of the DC universe we rarely see: how ordinary institutions (papers, cops, courts, scientists) function when telepaths can compel perjury and a suspect can outrun chain of custody.

The risk is obvious: if the doc conceit turns into winking filler, the show will feel like a pitch meeting stretched to six episodes. The opportunity is equally clear: build a credible newsroom thriller first, then layer in DC’s stranger physics. On those terms, DC Crime could convert skeptics – not by imitating superhero TV, but by solving a case only superhero TV could stage.