Reposting and cleaning the below up from a comment I made on Hijinx Ensues' discussion of The Cape. Summary: I enjoyed the first two hours of The Cape (after having worried that I would not), and am hopeful that the show gets a chance to bring us some more fun. Keith David was great and Bear McCreary's work seems to particularly stand out for me.
The thing I've most compared The Cape to is The Shadow. It very mch felt to me like they were trying to build a new "The Shadow" for a modern audience, without paying for the license and without the even campier 90s Alec Baldwin film hanging like the sword of Damocles above the show. For the most part I felt it succeeded in that, and I quite enjoyed it.
Batman, as old as he is, isn't the originator of most of these tropes. DC once stood for Detective Comics. The sub-genre "detective stories" has a deep history including a gamut of pulp era heroes (among others: The Shadow, Dick Tracy, Green Hornet, The Phantom, and many more -- several of which predate Batman).
It has been too long since a good weekly serial has promised new adventures should you tune in next week (even if you count Batman: The Animated Series), and, for a genre that helped spawn weekly serials in the place, that's a shame. We all should be excited that it takes more lessons from Batman Begins than from 80s and 90s "post-camp" reboot attempts. We should all be excited that The Cape isn't starring some overweight but likable comedy actor. Can't we celebrate the idea that this may not be the man soap that we need, but it just may be the one we deserve?