Michael Suarez
To me, the fall TV season of 25 years ago is legendary, particularly if you’re around my age or older. In 2001, the following shows had their fall premiere:
- Smallville
- Crossing Jordan
- Alias
- Undeclared
- 24
- Scrubs
- The Amazing Race
- Star Trek: Enterprise
That’s not even everything, and although I think a lot of these series deserve some attention this year, I wanted to highlight Smallville because for a time I really loved it, and given the current state of popular entertainment, it seemed like a good time to revisit it for its 25th anniversary.
The show’s premise is simple enough. It follows the early years of Clark Kent, before he becomes Superman, as he deals with being a teenager and honing the powers that will one day make him the famous superhero. The setting is Smallville, Kansas, and in addition to Clark, we follow a young Lex Luthor, who harbors some darkness within, but he’s fairly far removed from the villain he’ll one day become, although the journey there is interesting.
We also follow Clark’s and Lex’s parents, friends, and love interests. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, although there were seasonal arcs, most episodes week-to-week dealt with a big bad that was defeated by the episode’s end. Unlike Buffy, Smallville had more episodes on the weaker and bad side than good or great. That said, the show lasted 10 seasons, so the hit-or-miss average isn’t as bad as it looks, in my opinion.
To write this, I watched a few of my favorite episodes from each season, and yes, time has not been kind to the effects, but we’re talking network television in the first decade of the 21st century. Also, personally, bad effects and CGI are never deal breakers for me. And all in all, the show actually looks really good, probably because a lot of the show looks to be shot on location. Yes, I recognize sets like the high school, the Daily Planet, and the Kents’ barn, among plenty of others, but seeing it on Blu-ray, I have to be honest. The show looks good. Real effort was put into Smallville.
Now, of course, we’re looking at a total of 217 hours of network television, which means that each season ran at least 20 episodes with commercial breaks. It might be tough for modern TV audiences to understand what that was like, and I must admit that it can sometimes take me some time to find my old viewing rhythms again when I rewatch a show like Smallville. This, like a cliffhanger and dramatic music coming in before cutting to black, can sometimes throw the show off balance, but I only notice it more now because I watch shows live a lot less than I used to. As such, although it can throw off the flow of an older series like this one, it’s not the series’ fault.
It’s also important to note the acting in the show, which I actually really like, particularly Michael Rosenbaum’s portrayal of Lex Luthor, who is probably my favorite rendition of the character. He’s charming and confident, and he gives Lex the right amount of darkness each progressive season until Lex becomes an outright villain. It’s a very good performance.
I also love John Glover as Lionel Luthor, who brings a gravitas to the show in the way John Schneider and Annette O’Toole did as Clark’s parents, albeit in very different ways. This, of course, makes sense since these actors were practically veterans by the time the show premiered in 2001. They help elevate what Smallville always was, despite its comic origins: a teen drama on the WB (later the CW).
I’ve written about shows from the WB-era of television, and I am admittedly a fan of a lot of those shows, but I’m also willing to recognize how being on the network could hamstring the shows. For instance, Smallville was sold as “no tights, no flights,” meaning that although it was a show about a young Superman, he was never going to put on the suit, and he was never going to fly. Why would he? The show was going to be about his time in high school, battling a different villain every week. That would be enough for the show’s target teen audience, yes?
This is long before the MCU changed the game. Smallville came at a time when doing a superhero show on TV was pretty much synonymous with cheesiness. Now, to be fair, Smallville was never shy about being cheesy, but that genuinely was the result of its soap opera antics audiences would’ve expected from a WB series. For whatever reason, seeing superheroes in costume didn’t look cool.
Something cool happened, though. The show was a success, and as such, showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar began to slowly introduce more and more comic aspects into the show. At first, it was Clark gaining new powers. Soon, we’d get the Fortress of Solitude, various forms of Kryptonite, and yes, Clark flying. Viewers also got to see other heroes introduced, like a variation on the Flash, the Green Arrow, Black Canary, the Martin Manhunter, Aquaman, Cyborg, Supergirl, and plenty of others, not to mention the villains.
Eventually, Smallville would devote entire seasonal arcs to ideas taken directly from the comics, and regardless of the budget or how cheesy things got, I loved it. Of course, ten seasons for any show is a long time, and I can remember feeling itchy by Season 9, though there was nothing in particular that motivated me to want to stop watching. I think I was just starting to kind of get over the show. However, I stuck with it, and Season 10 does a solid job of wrapping as much as possible up, including bringing back actors who had long since left the show.
Season 1 got me because it was so cool to see a comic book world taken fairly seriously on TV, even with its WB trappings. To be honest, I don’t hate that stuff, although love triangles drive me crazy. By Season 10, I’d watch these characters grow, and the feature-length series finale, aptly titled “Finale,” is pretty epic as Clark and team prevent Darkseid, DC Comics’ ultimate bad guy, from coming to Earth. Overall, I loved this show, and rewatching several episodes again, I was reminded why.
I love how Smallville takes the source material seriously. The effects, although not great, serve things well enough for me. The series’ lead, Tom Welling, is worthy of being Superman, and it’s a damn shame we never got to see him in close-up wearing the costume. I love the look of the show and how much of the early season makes it seem like Kansas is always in autumn. It would also be remiss to not give props to Erica Durance, who, and I have to be honest here, is my all-time favorite Lois Lane. She’s so good.
Was the show perfect? Absolutely not. Two characters from the first season were never written well, in my opinion, though they do have their moments. First, there’s Sam Jones III as Pete Ross, Clark’s best friend, who has less and less to do as the show goes on, eventually being written out. The other is Lana Lang, played by Kristin Kreuk, who is the object of a few guys’ affections, mainly Clark’s. Despite the writers trying to give Kreuk something to do for the show’s first half, eventually she, too, left. I wouldn’t say either actor did bad work on the show, but I would say the writers never gave them enough to work with, not like the other series’ regulars from Season 1 on.
Overall, it’s clear to me that Smallville is an important television show. Because of how well it was made and its success, I believe it had a hand in shaping the landscape of modern-day pop culture, whether people like it or not. Along with 2000’s X-Men and 2002’s Spider-Man, among others, audiences were shown worlds similar to our own where heroes wore costumes, fought the villains, and ultimately won.
Stand-out episodes from all 10 seasons, for me, include “Rosetta” from Season 2, featuring Christopher Reeve; “Pariah” from Season 4; the show’s 100th episode, “Reckoning,” from Season 5; the two-part epic “Absolute Justice” from Season 9; and, of course, the first and last episodes of the series. That might sound odd given that the show had 217 episodes, so let me be clear about something. Yes, there are bad episodes of the show, but for the most part, I liked most of the episodes, and some are very good. These are just plain excellent episodes of television, so I felt they deserved to be highlighted.
If you’ve never seen Smallville before, I can see why giving it a chance sounds daunting. Also, the first season has a lot of growing pains before the show found its rhythm, the same position a lot of shows find themselves in at the start of their runs. However, I do believe it’s a show worthy of taking a look at. It’s very much a 2000s show in terms of content and the special effects, but I have no qualms about recommending it.
For me, Smallville was a show that both scratched my nerdy itch by being a superhero show that increasingly became a reflection of the comics it was inspired by, and told the story of decent people continually fighting for the right things. It was a cheesy teen soap opera, too. And even now, 25 years after its first episode premiered, I still love it.
