Through my career as an entertainment journalist, I've been lucky enough to recognize and begin covering a number of new series before there was ever a bandwagon to jump on to. Shows that come to mind include The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and (pertinent in the case of this article) Smallville.
Before Smallville ever debuted on the then WB, I managed to score an interview with co-creator and executive producer Al Gough, which in turn led to my covering the show extensively for seasons to come. What follows is a look at the show written from the perspective of two seasons having aired, essentially (although no one knew it at the time) only a 2/10 of its total run.
SMALLVILLE IN THE BEGINNING, PART 1
By Edward Gross
When Superman: The Movie was released in 1978, it was accompanied by the publicity tagline, “You’ll believe a man can fly.”
It’s a sentiment that the producers of the WB’s Smallville agree with, though they don’t seem to be in any rush to get there. “Our tagline,” offers co-creator and executive producer Al Gough, “is, ‘You know where the journey ends, this is where it begins.'”
And that is essentially the premise behind the series, which in its second season became the network’s highest-rated show and seems to be growing more popular with each passing episode. The reasons are understandable, as the show remains eminently relatable to its audience, thanks to the efforts of Gough and his partner, Miles Millar, who had come up with what would probably be a Jon Peters wet dream: a Superman series that didn’t exactly feature Superman, the image of him flying or his famous costume.
“For us,” says Gough, “the costume was never an issue. Batman’s always been sort of cool and people can relate to him. One of the problems with Superman is how do you make him relatable? I think he’s always been seen as the goody two-shoes of superheroes. And also, for us, we’re not doing Superboy. In truth, you never spent that much time in Smallville. It’s a wonderful section of Richard Donner’s movie, but it’s only fifteen minutes. There really hasn’t been any set mythology in Smallville, which is really kind of nice for us, because that’s why we’re sort of able to go into it and be respectful of the Superman mythology without being slavish to it.”
Adds Millar, “I think for us it was always a very compelling idea and in our minds we always knew it would succeed. It’s so rare that you can find an idea or hear an idea that makes you say, ‘Wow, that could really go out of the park.’ But there were challenges to overcome. That’s why we took him out of the suit and grounded him with no flying. For us it was liberating to take him out of the suit and really see the reason Superman becomes the man he becomes; really get inside this kid’s head and find out why he decides to do good for the world. Usually you see Superman as the character and Clark Kent as the foil, but here it’s Clark Kent is the character and Superman will be the foil later on.”
He admits that the producing duo were indeed criticized early on for their approach. “He becomes Superman in Metropolis and not in Smallville,” Millar says. “That’s what he needs in Metropolis, the dual identity, not in Smallville. For us, it’s like, ‘You’ve seen Lois & Clark, you’ve seen the four movies, how do you do it differently?’ How do you take an area of his life you haven’t seen before and do it in a way that’s fresh and original? Lois & Clark went off in the 1990s, so it’s still fresh in people’s memories. We wanted to do something different and we thought the character was such a pop culture icon that people would still respond. If you were to look at the pilot of Lois & Clark, it’s actually very smart, but it kind of lost faith in itself. It could have continued a breezy Moonlighting-style comic book hero, but it became cheesy. That’s something we were also very aware of: we never wanted to have the massive comic book villains and taking over the world kind of plots. We wanted to keep it real. When we were first introducing the series, someone suggested that we were doing the Marvel version of Superman, which we didn’t understand at the time. Now that we’ve worked on Spider-Man, we understand it. We definitely see the emotional core of the character, which has always been a trademark of Marvel characters.”
Smallville’s beginnings can be traced back to the fact that the WB – a network whose demographics have skewered young and whose reputation was built on shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dawson’s Creek – had begun developing a “Young Bruce Wayne” series that was designed to focus on the evolution of the orphaned millionaire into the Dark Knight. That project ultimately fell apart, most likely due to the fact that the studio began to feel that it would interfere with their big-screen Bat-franchise. This is where Gough and Millar entered the scene.
“Miles and I got a call from Peter Roth, who is the president of Warner Brothers television, and Tollins/Robbins, who are our producing partners on this and who were trying to produce the Bruce Wayne show,” says Gough, whose credits with Millar include the TV series The Strip and such features as Shanghai Noon and the forthcoming The Amazing Spider-Man [Spider-Man 2] and Iron Man. “The way it works at Warners is that the feature division controls the Batman and Superman rights, and they were developing two Batman movies. As a result, I don’t think they were willing to give those rights up. They seemed more willing to let Superman go, since their Superman movie is stuck in development hell. So we got a call from Peter and he said, ‘I have gotten permission from the feature people to do a young Superman series.’ We said, ‘Well, that sounds interesting, but we’re not interested in doing Superboy.’ He thought we had an interesting approach and we came up with our pitch, which was the idea of the meteor shower. That, I think, is the biggest change of the mythology in terms of when Clark comes to earth, he comes with a shower of meteors. That gave us storytelling possibilities in that the place that Clark lives is actually, in a way, home to his greatest weakness, which is Kryptonite. Then the Kryptonite itself allows you to do weird mutations. In the beginning we kept telling people that this show is Dawson’s Creek on the surface and Twin Peaks underneath. It also allowed Clark to battle people who can have a super power.
“From a practical standpoint,” he adds, “if a spaceship came to earth in 1989, the rings of satellites around the world would allow someone to see it. For us, the meteor shower was sort of the cover for the spaceship. We’re not in the ‘40s anymore. If anything comes into the atmosphere, somebody sees it instantly. So that’s how the meteor shower came about. Then we tied Lana and Lex together in terms of the impact the meteors have on both their lives (killing her parents, making him lose his hair), and we came up with the idea of making Jonathan and Martha Kent younger. We went in and pitched it, Peter loved it, DC signed off on the change in the mythology, which was crucial; and then we pitched it to Fox and the WB and the WB really loved it. It just felt like a good fit for the network in terms of what they were trying to do. In truth, it’s a lot of fun to reinvent iconic characters and see how they started. To us, Clark is like Anakin Skywalker, somebody whose future you know, but you get to see the journey, which is very interesting. Also, you get to see Lex’s journey: how does he become Superman’s arch villain when he and Clark start off as friends?”
As suggested, Smallville deals with a teenaged Clark Kent (played by relative newcomer Tom Welling), who’s not only dealing with normal issues of adolescence, but a variety of dawning super powers that are suddenly making themselves known, as well as a foreboding destiny as laid out by his Kryptonian father, Jor-El. All Clark wants is to have a normal life and feel as though he belongs, but as has become pretty evident, it’s not likely he’ll achieve either. Another integral character element is the presence of Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk), the one girl besides Lois Lane that the destined-to-be Man of Steel ever had any true feelings for; and the twenty-something Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum), whose father, Lionel (John Glover), has left him in Smallville to prove himself a proper heir to the Luthor fortune. Thanks to the set-up of the show, and the impact the meteorites (hence Clark) has had on the town and the characters of Lana and Lex, Clark is driven by guilt and a feeling of responsibility for protecting the people of Smallville with his newfound powers. His best friends include Pete (Sam Jones III) and Chloe (Allison Mack), who is the editor of the high school paper, The Torch.
Also significant in Clark’s maturing process are his adopted earth parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent (played respectively by former Dukes of Hazzard star John Schneider and former Lana Lang (from Superman III) Annette O’Toole), who are Clark’s grounding force, particularly when he wants to have fun with his powers.
“I think the metaphor of Smallville is definitely that this time of your life is one of change,” Gough suggests. “Things in town are mutating, the town is mutating both literally and figuratively. It’s changing and evolving and you get to see Clark’s evolution. The show is sort of about crystallizing who you are.”
TO BE CONTINUED