TV review: Smallville series premiere

digresssmlOriginally published October 26, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1458

Television being a spectacularly imitative medium, producers like to present new shows in ways that will evoke something else which has been successful. One also wants to have as many recognizable elements as possible in order to prompt more people to watch the show.

And it was decided that Superman remains a consistently popular and attractive character (except when Nicholas Cage is slated to play him) and furthermore that Superboy may well appeal to a youthful audience. Not to a juvenile audience, as the previous half hour Superboy series did, but rather that desirable, hotly coveted eighteen-to-twenty four demographic that apparently has money to spare and sets many of the trends for the rest of us.

One can almost see the light bulb flashing over the producers’ heads as they considered a series about Superman’s early years, and came up with the perfect pitch: Kal-El’s Creek.

It really is pretty ideal, when you get down to it. In the first Superman film, some of the most visually striking images take place on the plains of Smallville. Young Clark’s aching desire to be one of the gang is palpable. He knows beyond question that he is infinitely superior to any of those local yokels who look down their collective noses at him, and yet he must keep that superiority under wraps, lest their scorn turn to something even worse: Fear. He may look like them, but he is not one of them. He is something outside, something unnatural. Normal teens feel alienated enough; imagine how problematic it is for a teenager who really is an alien, such as none we have ever seen.

And the notion of such a TV series couldn’t have come at a better time for the WB, seeking to fill the superteen angst hole left in its schedule by the defection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (On a side note, I now find my comfort level challenged in terms of letting ten year old Ariel watch Buffy. I’ve had no trouble in the past letting her be exposed to the fictional, monstrous doings in Sunnydale, because in the face of evil, she’s also watching acts of tremendous bravery by flawed but fundamentally good and heroic people. But I absolutely, positively hate having her view commercials for unspeakably sleazy programs such as Blind Date. I may have to start taping it and deleting the commercials altogether, so that I don’t have her pondering such depthless notions as trashy TV shows that “put the ‘hot’ in ‘hot tub.’”)

Thus we have Kal-El’s Creek or, as it’s more popularly known, Smallville.

The pilot episode opens in the year 1989, as the peaceable townsfolk of Smallville (population around 20,000) are going about their business, when they are suddenly under fire by the mother of all meteorite storms. Chunks of what we, the savvy comic book reader, know to be the remains of the planet Krypton, chew up half the countryside, and also cause three year old Lana Lang to see her parents annihilated before her horrified eyes.

As we all know, or could at the very least have surmised, the rocks from space also herald the arrival of the smiling baby of steel, miraculously unscathed. He is found and adopted by Jonathan and Martha Kent, at which point we jump to “Today” to find a very different Smallville than when we started. The population has more than doubled, and—like Roswell, New Mexico turning itself into a permanent haven for tourists by milking the “flying saucer crash” for all it’s worth—Smallville has now become a tourist attraction, home of the falling meteors.

It’s also the home of the exceptionally hunky Clark Kent, played with smoldering intensity and mounting frustration by Tom Welling, a disgustingly good looking actor who—in certain shots—looks so much like a young Chris Reeve that you can only pray they never do an episode in which he rides a horse, because it’ll be too upsetting to watch. He hungers for the exotically attractive Lana (Kristin Kreuk), whose mere presence literally makes him weak in the knees, for a fairly clever plot reason that I won’t reveal. Lana, however, is busy dating—for no discernible reason—Clark’s nemesis, the swaggering athlete and bully Flash Thomp… I’m sorry, “Whitney” (Eric Johnson.) Clark is desperate to prove that he’s everything Whitney is and more, fantasizing about mopping up the entire football field with singlehanded gridiron heroics. Instead he suffers silently, reflecting the sort of angst that anyone in that situation has ever felt: If only she knew the real me, she’d love me instead of that idiot.

But Whitney is not the one that Clark has to watch out for. That honor belongs to young Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum). In fact, he’s the one that everyone should be watching for, lightyears away from Gene Hackman’s campy movie Luthor, and trumping even John Shea’s crafty villainy in Lois and Clark. Rosenbaum craftily plays him as a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Claiming that he’s nothing like his ruthless millionaire father, Luthor exudes a magnetic charm. He seems utterly likable. But at the same time you get a definite cat-and-mouse vibe from him as he cultivates his relationship with Clark, and when he silkily delivers in-joke lines such as, “Tell me, Clark… do you believe a man can fly?” you find yourself wondering just how much he knows. The Clark/Luthor scenes are the moments when the show really crackles.

Taking the cue from the hero-creates-villain/villain-creates-hero scenario popularized by the first Batman film, we see that the meteor shower results in Luthor’s going bald at a young age (which, frankly, beats the notion that Superboy blew it off through a freak chemical accident.) That shower is also held to account for literally hundreds of other weird things that occur in Smallville, probably so the producers can have a rationalization for this particular town encountering all manner of superpowered oddities. I’m not entirely sure there needed to be a reason, but if they had to come up with something, what were you expecting? Smallville was situated on top of a Hellmouth?

The script by Al Gough and Miles Millar endeavors to blend the dreaminess of a Dawson’s Creek with the tense urgency of—well—a young Superman discovering his destiny and defending his town. The blend works well sometimes, less so other times, and stumbles badly in Clark’s confrontation with the danger du jour at the climax, although the direction by veteran David Nutter is never anything less than confident and occasionally inspired. The acting all around is sincere, and a subplot involving two of Clark’s friends on the school newspaper (Samuel L. Jones and the lively Allison Mack) investigating the strange doings in Smallville has some promise to it. Cynthia Ettinger and John Schneider as Ma and Pa Kent, unfortunately, are far too youthful to have the homespun charm that we’ve seen in others assaying the roles. Obviously they’re going for a different effect here, but it comes across initially as just kind of colorless… except for one moment when a skeptical Clark, in learning of his origins, says, “And where’s my space ship? Hidden in the attic?” only to be stunned when his chagrined dad replies, “Actually, no, it’s in the storm cellar” and shows it to him.

There is, of course, one intrinsic problem in doing things this way: As a viewer, you have to check at the door any knowledge of who and what Clark Kent eventually becomes, because with the way it’s set up in Smallville, it’s just not gonna work. For instance, in the Silver Age, Luthor and Clark were portrayed as boyhood friends, or at least acquaintances. But in that continuity, Clark’s dual identity was already in place as the mild-mannered, bespectacled teen. What we’re seeing in Smallville, in the rugged features of young Clark—with his bangs and his lack of eyewear—is the face of the future Superman. There is absolutely no way we can believe that, six, seven years down the line, Lex Luthor—Clark’s close friend—won’t take one look at Superman and say, “Clark! Dude! What’s with the blue and red tights?”

As for me, I’m waiting to see what happens when Clark’s x-ray vision kicks in and he realizes he can look through clothes, or the wall of the girls’ locker room. They may get around it by indicating that when he uses it, he sees bone and musculature, which is hardly erotic. But can you imagine Dawson acquiring such a power and not using it for the obvious? Or Pacey, for that matter, or even Felicity? Didn’t think so. The trick with Smallville is going to be keeping it real… because if they stress the superheroics too much, without the budget to pull it off, and lose sight of the humanizing heroic journey of Clark Kent, then the show’ll be gone faster than a speeding bullet.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)

 

6 comments on “TV review: Smallville series premiere

  1. Peter, did you actually get to review the unaired version of the pilot with Ettinger as Martha, before they recast the role?

    Did you stick with the show, and any thoughts on how it ended up?

  2. I lost interest after episode 100 with the death of Jonathan Kent. The Clark-Jonathan relationship was my favorite part of the show. The Lana-Luthor relationship on the other hand was very annoying.

    1. They finally solved the annoying Lana/Luthor issue by writing them both out of the show. It recovered a lot after that, as the show focused more on Lois/Clark and Lois/Clark/Chloe, and on bringing in more DC Universe elements (Green Arrow and the Smallville version of the Justice League, the JSA, Zod, Darkseid, etc.)

  3. “As for me, I’m waiting to see what happens when Clark’s x-ray vision kicks in and he realizes he can look through clothes, or the wall of the girls’ locker room.”

    Well, you nailed that one.

  4. I wasn’t a fan of SMALLVILLE; and for some of its worst moments, here’s a nice Topless Robot article on what the show gave us instead of actual Superman: http://www.toplessrobot.com/2011/08/10_incredibly_stupid_things_smallville_gave_us_ins.php I’d add the fact that for most of the early seasons, with the “freak of the week,” the prison was filled with people who knew Clark Kent had superpowers and had caught them. Yet somehow Lex Luthor still couldn’t figure out Clark Kent’s secret/powers, when all he had to do was ask one person in the prison!

  5. I enjoyed it well enough in the early seasons, but it really found a nice groove once Gough and Millar left the show. I didn’t envy the new showrunners still being beholden to the “no flights, no tights” edict, but they did a good job within their limitations. That said, I felt that their resolutions to the various seasons’ main arcs and big bads all seemed a bit thrown together.

    And the final scene of the series? Pretty much what I’d expected (and wanted) since some point in late season one/early season two, made all the better by the use of the John Williams theme.

    –Daryl

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