‘The Flash' Stars Mark 10th Anniversary Of CW Series Premiere
‘The Flash' Stars Mark 10th Anniversary Of CW Series Premiere
The Arrowverse’s longest runner celebrates a decade of an existence that will keep running in its finished state
This may have been the fastest decade. Running for nine seasons and nearly 200 episodes that ended in May 2023, it didn’t leave a lot of time left before The Flash would be celebrating its tenth anniversary since its premiere on The CW. The Flash was the first spinoff of Arrow, the next step in building an entire television universe, following appearances by Grant Gustin as eventual title speedster Barry Allen and Danielle Panabaker as Caitlin Snow and Carlos Valdes as Cisco Ramon, separate from Gustin’s in the second season of Arrow. And with Monday being October 7, 2024, that day has come.
Gustin, who has already marked his arrival to a 2024 date that Barry visited and the passing of the date of the original Red Sky crisis, posted to his Instagram Stories BossLogic art of Flash boots with text that reads “10 years since the first Flash episode aired... wild. Changed my life and forever connected me to a characterthat now means so much to me. Thank you to all the Flash fans that have showed me so much love and support over the last decade.”
Panabaker, who would take on a second role of Frost, who started out as Caitlin’s villainous metahuman alter ego before becoming a hero and her literal own separate person, posted to Instagram “I can’t believe today marks ten years since the first episode of @cwtheflash aired, and my life changed forever. It’s brought so many amazing people, experiences, and core memories into my life. I’m eternally grateful for what we were able to create, and so glad that it resonated with so many of you. Dug deep in the archives to find a few photos that made me smile and I hope they do the same for you”. It captions over a dozen photos from across the show’s run with many of her co-stars from the entire Arrowverse. Among the commenters was Danielle Nicolet, who played Cecile Horton, the district attorney whose long-term relationship with Joe West basically made her Iris’s stepmother, though they were still unmarried when the series ended. She appeared across eight of the nine seasons, the second the only of them she missed, with the final five spent as series regular, and by the end had taken on the hero name Virtue. She wrote “Can’t believe it’s been 10 years! Time flies! So grateful for the friendship it gave us.” Kayla Compton, who played Allegra Garcia in the show’s latter four seasons, shared Panabaker’s post in her Stories and added a heart.
The show’s official accounts had been marking the anniversary since the start of the weekend, sharing behind the scenes pictures, a compilation of the show’s best fight scenes, and even doing a little trivia before repurposing a previous season poster to add a tenth anniversary banner. The posts finish with the reminder that Monday night would be the two-episode premiere of the fourth and final season of Superman & Lois, the final Arrowverse or Arrowverse-adjacent series on The CW after twelve years, something star Bitsie Tulloch, whose (first) Lois Lane debuted in The Flash’s “Elseworlds” episode in 2018 acknowledged in her comment on Panabaker’s post. That series is what will likely be the last DC adaptation on the network for all but two seasons on the former Warner Bros.-owned network initially known as The WB. Whether live action (Smallville, 2001) or animated (Superman: The Animated Series, 1996), it begins and ends with Superman. Both Tulloch and co-star Tyler Hoechlin, who is her Clark/Superman, expressed their gratitude for their journeys in their own Instagram posts with the same picture from a cast and crew party.
Candice Patton, who played Barry’s eventual wife Iris West-Allen in all nine seasons, recently welcomed her first child, a son.
Sources: Comic Book Resources