Before I begin this
section, I have to give some of my own backstory. I have never liked comic books. I have several
fundamental reasons for this, but because they directly explain my problems
with several of the shows in this article, I’ll hold off going into why for
now. Suffice to say, I never liked them when I was a child and well past that
point.
That dislike did not
extend to television series based on comic books. As a teenager, I was
fascinated by several Fox cartoons based on them, especially Batman: The
Animated Series, X-Men, and Spiderman, which in the latter case was
a precursor for cartoons to what the MCU would accomplish nearly a decade later
in movies. Similarly, my problems didn’t extend to filmed versions of comics, I
generally admire many of the movies within the MCU and consider Christopher
Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy the cinematic high point for comic book
adaptations.
I think the fact that
I never truly got into the comic book world the way that most, if not all of
the fans of this world did may have served me better than many of the
traditional viewer. Because I had no idea about what canon was beyond the bare
minimum of these stories (the secret identity, basic backstory, and knowledge
of many of the villains in several of these worlds) I wasn’t fundamentally
inclined the way far many too trolls are when the writers of these films and
shows went off book. At my core, I viewed them the same way that I do
everything else on TV: I was interested in good stories, well told. That may
have been the reason I was drawn into one of the CW’s series that originated
with the WB: Smallville, the story of Clark Kent’s childhood before he
became Superman.
I watched the first six
seasons of the series pretty much on a weekly basis and more or less abandoned
the series at the beginning of Season 7. This had nothing to do with the quality
of the show, but rather the fact that other series that I liked more were
running against it. (One has to remember that in the late 2000s, streaming
fundamentally didn’t exist, and what little there was had to be viewed on
computer screens more than anything else. The idea of streaming a series days
after the event was still a few years off and neither Netflix nor Amazon had
embraced it yet.) But several years after Smallville ended, I ended up
rewatching the entire series in a combination of syndication and streaming.
In my opinion, Smallville
works all the way through. The producers had made it fundamentally clear
that Clark Kent would not don the costume until the series finale, a vow that
they kept. So much of the series, particularly in the first four seasons
proceeded as a variation on The X-Files and Buffy, as Clark Kent
became slowly but sure aware of his powers and tried to figure out who among
his friends he could trust. The series
diverged from canon in many ways, perhaps most crucially by having Clark save
Lex Luthor’s life in the Pilot and have the two basically be close friends for
the first five seasons of the series. In that we saw, not just the rise of Superman
but the corruption of Lex Luthor and the series went out of its way to make the
latter story just as important and in a way, far more tragic. Michael Rosenbaum
was superb as we saw the good man who was within being worn down by his demons
and the corruption of his own family, represented by his father Lionel (Jon
Glover in one of his best roles.) You spent much of the first half of the
series knowing Lex’s ultimate fate, but you kept hoping that somehow Clark’s
could redeem, and when the series ended with the inevitable drawing of the
lines between them, you could feel the sorrow when Clark said: “I’m sorry I couldn’t
save you.”
It was not until the
fourth season that the writers slowly began to trickle in other characters from
the DC universe, also in their childhood. In the fourth season, we ended up
meeting a young Bart Allen (The Flash), in Season 5 we met an eco-terrorist
named Arthur Curry (Aquaman) and Cyborg, and in the middle of Season 6 we met
the young billionaire Oliver Queen. The series had already set up some of the
other elements of Clark’s life with us meeting Lana Lang as a series regular (I’ll
get back to her in a minute) and eventually in Season 4, Lois Lane showed up to
the town. In the second half of the
series, Clark moved to Metropolis to start an internship at the Daily Planet
where he would eventually meet a young Jimmy Olsen. Martian Manhunter showed up
in Season 6, and in Season 7 so did Kara Danvers. There was also a slow but
steady trickle of villains. Brainiac eventually showed up in Season 5 (a nearly unrecognizable James Marsters) Doomsday
had an entire storyline in Season 8, and Zod who had been mentioned several
times throughout the early seasons finally appeared in Season 9. We also would
see cameos from many players who had smaller roles, including Amanda Waller and
members of both Suicide Squad and the Justice Society.
What I think made Smallville
work so well – in my opinion, its still the gold standard for comic
book based television – was that all the way through, it kept you in suspense
even though anyone who knew most of Superman the eventual fates of the
characters. There were storylines that didn’t work – the potential love story
between Clark and Lana became deadweight fairly early not just because Clark
kept hiding the truth about itself but because anyone with even a marginal
memory of the series knew it was doomed.
But because it was true to the framework of the show without violating
canon, it had the spirit of a DC comic but a fair amount of charm. The writers would
pay tribute to this throughout the series – Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder
had cameos early on, Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher who had each played Clark and
Lois in a 1990s series had minor cameos and Jor-El was voiced throughout series
by Terence Stamp. And the show made it fundamentally clear that everything we
saw was a part of Clark’s backstory in a way the comic just never did. Martha
and Jonathan Kent were almost background in the early stages, with Jonathan’s
death being considering the defining moment of Clark’s life. When Jonathan Kent
did die in the series 100th Episode because the show had spent five
seasons showing us just how vital he was (and credit to the work of John Schneider
for being the father we all wanted), it was gut-wrenching it really couldn’t
have been in any film.
Near the end of
Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, in a discussion of comic books, Bill says
that Superman stands alone because: “Superman didn’t become Superman.
Superman was born Superman.” Smallville is the counter-argument
to this line. Its shows that Clark Kent may have been born Superman but growing
up he wanted to be Clark far more than he ever did Superman. It shows Clark
alternately rejected and accepting destiny, trying to make his powers part of him but not
who he was, trying to have friends and romance, trying to be a normal
person - in short, the struggles that come
with growing up. From his first introduction, Superman was shown as someone who
had to stand apart from the rest of humanity. Smallville fundamentally
argues that Clark Kent wanted to be part of it. If you wish to read religious
metaphors or arguments of destiny over free will into this, you’re welcome to –
this has been a part of fantasy and sci-fi almost since the creation of it as a
genre. But it doesn’t hurt that Smallville was also a crackling good
adventure story, well told and with a very accurate sense of humor. The fact
that it chose to make its final episode basically at the part where most Superman
movies begin only goes to prove that this was the story of the journey of
Clark Kent more than it was ever Superman, and that Clark was, in his own way,
just as interesting as Superman ever was.
I did not intend to
make this article a gushing rave for Smallville, because it wasn’t a
perfect show. As I said, it spent too much time and energy over the first seven
seasons on the Clark-Lana romance only to write her out of the story in Season
8 when Kristin Kreuk’s contract came to an end in a truly unsatisfying way. It
also didn’t help that when Rosenbaum’s contract came to an end in Season 7, Lex
Luthor was more or less written out of the show until the series finale, even
though his presence was felt throughout the series, in truly messy and
monstrous way. And the fact that so many of the stories dealt with meteor rocks
(kryptonite, though it didn’t get called that until Season 3) and its
aftereffects as sort of deux ex machina was an obstacle the series never worked
around. But overall, Smallville was an immensely satisfying series that
may have been the most successful product that the CW ever inherited from the
WB, ending on the right notes. And that includes a key shift in Season 6.
As I said Oliver Queen
was introduced that season by a then relatively unknown Justin Hartley. His relationship
with Clark was clearly meant to serve as a counterbalance to that between him
and Lex Luthor – by this point in the series, Clark and Lex were all but
enemies. Oliver was already taking on the mantel of the Green Arrow, and the
story of his rise to prominence and his friendship with Clark was well-handled.
He was introduced initially as a love interest to Lois (who was actually more
in love with the Green Arrow at the time, quelle surprise) and eventually he
became friends and eventually married original character Chloe Sullivan (the
now disgraced Allison Mack, one of the few characters who stayed with the series
from the pilot). Throughout the series, Oliver was the focus of planning various
aspects of the superhero world we all know – he formed alliances with the Flash,
Aquaman and Cyborg; we saw him form a relationship
with Dinah Lance (introduced as a conservative anti-vigilante broadcaster) and
eventually revealing his secret identity in the final season to the world.
Hartley’s character was so popular that at one point, a Green Arrow with
Hartley as the lead was planned for the 2007-2008 season but the writer’s
strike that year scuttled the idea and Hartley stayed on as a regular on Smallville
for the rest of the series’ run.
It's interesting to
think what a Green Arrow spinoff with Hartley as the lead would have
looked like. Hartley was suffering from many of the demons that Berlanti would
mine so well in his own show, but he genuinely seemed more connected to reality
and more openly cheerful about what he was doing than what we actually got.
Considering that the creators had already laid the groundwork for so many of
the characters in the DC world and would continue to do so in a subtler way
(back then, the DC world was still not part of the mainstream as it is today)
it would have been interesting to watch. (Then again, there’s no guarantee it
would have been as good: in 2004, the creators would try their luck in the
world of Gotham City with their version of Birds of Prey, a female led
series so messy and badly received it was canceled before half a season was
over.)
Still, watching Smallville
you got the sense of everything that a comic book based series could transcend
the boundaries of television. For a while, it seemed that Greg Berlanti was
going to be able to take the ball and run with it. The problem was, he ran too
fast, too far and took up too much territory as we’ll see in the next article.
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