Marksrevenge: A show about the butler? How could people NOT be lining up to watch that?

Especially because all the comics interpretations where Alfred was some sort of badass before the whole Batman thing were crap that ruined the character.

The whole fun of Alfred was the running implication that he basically randomly picked up various mad ninja skills as part of his duties as a butler to accompany and support his employer at various social events, which he interpreted to include the occasional gang-fight etc.  He was the most literal 'supporting character' in existence, to the point it was entirely believable that he'd put in 20k hours at the shooting range during his time with Bruce just because he was that good at planning around his employer's probable needs.

He was also at his peak fun level when he'd buttle so hard that he'd straight-up resolve the plot of the comic without breaking character for a single instant.  He was basically the walking hard-counter to the Penguin because Penguin's whole deal is wanting to be part of high society and Alfred immediately goes full Butler on anyone who opens the door, very much including people in weird costumes with masks or deformities etc.

// Alfred being the same butler as Bruce's parents' butler was actually kind of inconsistent between early comics, especially bronze and silver-age books; it was often implied that he'd been hired after Batman was already Batman specifically because his professional tolerance of employer weirdness extended to mask and cape nonsense.  It got fully canonized that he was a surrogate father to Bruce only later on when writers decided that Batman was too edgy and grim to ever actually be any fun, and every character in existence got rewritten for pathos with... varying levels of effectiveness depending on the writer and how good they were at managing tone on a scale of zero to Bruce Timm.