Black Lightning’s tenure keeping the city of Freeland safe is about to come to an end.
The CW has announced that the popular superhero series Black Lightning will be wrapping up at the end of its fourth season, set to begin airing early next year. This marks the second CW superhero series that has announced its ending at the end of the upcoming season. Last September, it was announced that Supergirl would be wrapping up its six season run next spring.
Black Lightning stars Cress Williams as the titular superhero, now retired and working as a high school principal. He is compelled to redon his mask and use his ability to manipulate electricity when his two daughters Anissa and Jennifer are kidnapped by gang members. Later, Anissa and Jennifer discover that they have superpowers of tehir own and eventually come to help their father protect Freeland.
In a statement, series developer and executive producer Salim Akil said –
When we first started the Black Lighting journey, I knew that Jefferson Pierce and his family of powerful Black Women would be a unique addition to the super hero genre. The love that Blerds and all comic book fans around the globe have shown this series over the past three seasons proved what we imagined, Black People Want To See Themselves in all their complexities.
Although based on a comic book character from DC Comics, Black Lightning was initially kept separate from the other continuity-sharing DC Comics-based shows on the CW, existing on it’s own separate Earth in the comic’s multidimensional cosmology. However, during the CW’s big Crisis On Infinite Earths event last year, Black Lightning’s Earth merged into one Earth with the rest of the alternate worlds of the CW Arrowverse. But even as it now shared an Earth with the other heroes like the Flash and Supergirl, the show has still mainly stayed off by itself, not interacting with the other heroes. Of course, pandemic-related production shutdowns and a delayed launch of all of the new Arrowverse shows’ new seasons may have hampered any potential crossover plans.
