The Cape, the new NBC series about a wrongly-accused cop who dresses up as a Batman-like hero to fight corruption in the mythical Palm City, has debuted.

Trained by circus people – that's right; he has all the powers of the Big Top – cop Vince Faraday (played by David Lyons) uses his cape like Cirque de Soleil uses ropes.

He's got a regular villain too, because the evil businessman who framed him also moonlights as the series' bad guy. Plus, Firefly's Summer Glau is also on hand.

NBC needs a big hit, or even a little hit, following their fall to fourth place in a 4-network race. So how did the debut actually do in the ratings?

According to Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily, the series debut was "OK."

TV Fanatic referred to the ratings as "decent."

But New York Magazine's Vulture notes that the ratings news "wasn't so great."

Vulture also has a list of their choice of the 10 most awful lines of dialogue from the pilot. I think some of them are terrific and fun, but what do I know?

In his recap/review of the pilot, Charlie Jane Anders at io9 says "the show is clearly the work of people who haven't picked up a comic since the 1960s."

However, at The Point Radio host Mike Raub has an interview with The Cape's creator Tom Wheeler (who wrote and produced the tv mini-series Empire) who talks about his love of comics.

The Cape was heavily promoted by NBC which means they ran a lot of promos for it on their own network, posted a nifty 16-page comic book on their website (illustrated by Michael Gaydos), and since this is the digital age, they created a, wait for it, trivia quiz.

Really? I know some guys that could've created a sweet iPhone app. They win awards for them.

I enjoyed the pilot – it's a lot of set-up which networks seem to demand in their super-hero TV, but it was fun and stylistic and interesting and I'll give it some episodes to see where the story goes. Heck, I gave Lost a whole season!

[Artwork: The Cape, © NBC]