Gotham may not have shown Batman until the final seconds of its series finale , but the Fox show certainly had no problem putting its own spin on the members of the Dark Knight’s rogues gallery, from Penguin and Riddler being two of the most important characters, to folks like Mr. Freeze and Mad Hatter causing trouble across multiple seasons. However, one villain who technically got the Gotham treatment was Batman’s arch-nemesis, The Joker.
Instead, identical twins Jerome and Jeremiah Valeska , played by Cameron Monaghan , filled the void left by The Clown Prince of Crime, and Gotham producer John Stephens addressed the difficulties that came with this approach. It’s not like the creative minds behind Gotham deliberately steered clear of using The Joker, it’s just that during the show’s five-season run, they were told by “higher ups,” as Monaghan once described them, that the name Joker and his trademark green hair could not be used. Jerome and Jeremiah were each labeled as a “Proto-Joker,” and here’s what Stephens had to say about this in a Gotham oral history put together by IGN : There are a lot of different voices, and different elements involved, and they had different agendas.
Different people wanted different things with different properties. And yeah, there were certain things that were off limits, like The Joker. And so we did a lot of work arounds with Jerome and his brother in order to make a kind of Joker predecessor, or Joker-ish type characte.
