The CW Superfriends: Smallville

Smallville.

The word pulls up quaint, quiet middle America. Corn and wheat and white picket fences. And one of the most iconic superheroes of all time.

Though it first aired nearly seventeen years ago, Smallville made waves that are still being felt today. If you've enjoyed any of the CW shows in the past few years, you owe their existence to the success of that first gamble.

Here's my thoughts. I'm reverting the format of the review, for reasons that should become clear.


For anyone not already familiar, Smallville follows a young Clark Kent from his first day of highschool through his marriage to Lois Lane. Throughout the show, Clark struggles with normal teenage ennui, burgeoning superpowers, the schemes of villains large and small, and the pull of multiple loyalties as he becomes the Superman we all know.

Costumes/Visuals:
The show managed to do a lot with a little here.

With the use of a few major sets, the show takes you from Smallville (Kent Farm, Smallville High, Talon Theater, Luthor Mansion), to Metropolis (Daily Planet, Lexcorp Offices) very easily. With 90% of the action happening in those spaces, the show can keep the action moving without a lot of budget blown or time spent establishing new locations. Simple redressing of the set can give you whole new rooms on the cheap. Later seasons added the Fortress of Solitude, Watchtower, and Green Arrow's loft, but stuck to the same formula.

If you're paying a lot of attention to it, it starts to mess with the sense of scale for the world, but for a television show on a mediocre budget, it works.

Because much of the action takes place among normal townspeople, your costumes are mostly everyday wear appropriate to the characters: While the Luthors wear tailored suits, Jonathan Kent wears an old leather jacket.

For Clark, the majority of the show he's in jeans and some combination of red and blue t-shirts and/or jackets. It's just a subtle reminder of the character's future while sticking to the producers' "no tights, no flights" framework.

As part of that framework, the supers are dressed like normal people (for the most part) and it's the powers that get the focus.

On the special effects front, Smallville did a great job. Clark's powers are well defined and visibly interesting, as are those of the villains (for the most part; poor Tony Todd faking a seizure in fast forward was an incredibly lame waste of that actor). Viewers are never at a loss for what is happening or who is doing it. Some of the CGI effects may seem a little dated now, but they work for the look and feel of Smallville.

Music:
The original music for the show is fairly forgettable. It adds to the foreground action without distracting you, which may be the gold ring they were aiming for.

The popular music used in the show is much better. I had never heard of Remy Zero  before watching Smallville, but they made a big hit with the opening theme song. Additionally, both my wife and I enjoyed reliving our college years with the music in the early seasons. It was a Billboard Top 20 countdown of the mid-90s through the early-00s. It dates the show a bit, but for the target audience at the time the show was airing, it was a solid decision.

Action:
Boy is there a lot of it. Every episode has Clark facing a natural or man-made disaster, a Kryptonite-fueled villain, magic gone wrong, or normal thugs and modern weapons.

Basically everything you've ever seen in a Superman comic is in this show. Bullets bounce, heat vision melts, super-strength lifts and breaks, cold breath blows and freezes, and Clark races toward danger at mach 2. Bombs explode, cars crash, meteors fall, storms threaten, earthquakes raze buildings, wraith-like aliens attack bystanders, and spaceships threaten to destroy whole towns.

Acting:
There were a lot of young, unknown actors cast for this show. This means the first season or two are rather lacking in the acting department. Most of the actors did grow and mature in the craft, though, and several of the more veteran cast turn in great performances. Here's a few notes:

- Eric Johnson as Whitney Fordman. He's a main credit cast member in the first season and his character may as well have been made of wood. The character was only in a couple episodes of later seasons. While his acting does improve by those episodes, he's still a weak link when on screen.

-Tom Welling as Clark Kent. Welling is a fairly solid, workman-like actor. His early performances are weak, but by the end of the first season he feels genuine. He just doesn't improve much beyond that over the course of the show.

- Kristin Kreuk as Lana Lang. Kreuk improves the most visibly over her stint on the show. She starts out very wooden and with a very noticeable lisp in her speech. By the time she left the cast, she's moved on past Tom Welling as an actor and her speech is clear. She obviously worked very hard to make those changes.

- Michael Rosenbaum as Lex Luthor. Rosenbaum's Lex is the reason to watch this show. This is, in my opinion, the best Lex Luthor we have yet seen in a live action performance. Rosenbaum makes every scene he's in better and the interactions between him and John Glover are great.

We also get quality performances from a star studded cast including (at various times) John Schneider, Annette O'Toole, Allison Mack, Justin Hartley, John Glover, Aaron Ashmore, James Marsters, Callum Blue, and Jensen Ackles. There are great guest appearances from actors like Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve.

Writing:
This show suffered something awful here. The writing is very uneven. Part of this was the fact that they never knew if they were getting renewed or not, so every season finale save the last is a huge cliffhanger that attempted to bump up ratings. Every. Single. One.

Of course, when it worked, the writers then had to walk back the explosive revelations from last season's final episodes. Case study: season one ends with Clark rushing out of prom to rescue Lana who's truck is being pulled up into a tornado. To rescue her, he dives head first into a funnel cloud, yanks a door off the hinges, and covers her with his own invulnerable back. Lana sees him do this, so to save the status quo, she loses those few crucial minutes as the result of a concussion.

This isn't limited to the season ending episodes, either. The tendency to overextend the story happens throughout. Lex Luthor has suspicions about Clark from their first meeting, but the evidence and/or the memories that would confirm those suspicions is conveniently destroyed time after time.

This is annoying to the viewer as we rehash the same plot point "Will X discover Clark's secret?" again and again. But even worse is the diminished returns. When Lex finally does discover Clark's secret and is allowed to keep it, there is no emotional punch. What should have been a tense reveal with incredible fallout feels like thrice-warmed-over lasagna: we've eaten this meal before and it was better fresh.

Not to say that there isn't any good writing in the show. There's a ton of witty one-liners, including references to Superman movies and television of the past. Some of the episodes DO hold some emotional punch.

There's an episode where Lex is split into his better and worse natures, a la Jekyll and Hyde. The final confrontation between the two ends with a powerful speech by Hyde-Lex that nails the super villain's ethos and actually makes you feel just how torn the character is.

This is also the show that gives us the coolest Jimmy Olsen ever.

Sadly, it's also the show that had his wife jilt him, made him a drug addict, and then killed him. Did I mention that latter seasons of this show had a lot of soap opera in them?

Conclusion
If you run for ten seasons you must be doing something right. For the WB/CW set in the early 2000s, the Dawson's Creek meets Superman formula was a winning one. Full of fun banter, heroic action, and a moral universe filled with solid characters, Smallville showed the world that people want to see heroes in action. Unfortunately, poor production decisions and bad writing choices never quite let the show get out of its own way and deliver everything it promised.