Superman has always been a trailblazer: besides pretty much singlehandedly starting the notion of superhero comics when he was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1938, the first radio and animated adaptations of superheroes, and one of the first live-action ones, featured the man of steel, and the first TV show based on a superhero was The Adventures of Superman starring George Reeves. The first superhero feature film that wasn’t tied to television was 1978’s Superman, and in the 2010s, Superman would lead off DC’s attempt at a cinematic universe with Man of Steel (which we’ll cover next week).
In the midst of the revived interest in the 1990s in DC’s characters in cinema (the Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher Batman films), animation (Batman: The Animated Series, Superman: The Animated Series, Justice League), and television (Superboy, The Flash), ABC gave us Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.
In 1986, Superman was one of many DC characters who was rebooted and revamped in the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths. That landmark miniseries by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez was designed to clean out the cruft, as it were, in the DC universe, streamlining everything into a single timeline and starting over to some degree.
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To that end, John Byrne wrote and drew the Man of Steel miniseries, aided in the development by Marv Wolfman. In that six-issue series, Byrne made several changes to the mythos, including eliminating the character of Superboy, with Clark Kent not taking on a heroic identity until adulthood; making Kent less of a klutzy milksop and having a strong personality of his own; changing Lex Luthor from a mad scientist to a wealthy and powerful industrialist, who is viewed by the public as a good guy; and, perhaps most significantly, having Jonathan and Martha Kent continue to be alive into Kent’s adulthood, allowing his adoptive parents to continue to be part of the narrative.
Inspired by DC president Jenette Kahn wanting to get Superman on television (following the moderate success of the half-hour syndicated Superboy series that ran from 1988-1992), Deborah Joy LeVine created a show that emphasized the relationship between Kent and fellow reporter Lois Lane, using the revamped continuity as a springboard. Dean Cain was cast as Kent, with Teri Hatcher playing Lane. Reflecting the new status quo, John Shea played the new version of Luthor (the only live-action interpretation that truly follows the post-1986 comics version; all others have either been the old mad scientist version or a mix of both versions), while K Callan and Eddie Jones were cast as Martha and Jonathan Kent. The pilot also features Elizabeth Barondes as Lane’s sister Lucy (intended to be a regular, though she’d be written out after three episodes) and Kim Johnston Ulrich as Dr. Antoinette Baines, plus a cameo by Persis Khambatta in what turned out to be her last role before her death in 1998 as the Congress of Nations Chairperson. Lane Smith, Tracey Scoggins, and Michael Landes round out the main cast as Kent and Lane’s fellow Daily Planet folk Perry White, Cat Grant, and Jimmy Olsen, respectively.
The pilot was a success, and the show lasted four seasons on ABC, though there was a certain amount of upheaval after the first season ended. Shea left, with only a few guest appearances in subsequent seasons, Scoggins was written out, and Landes was replaced by Justin Whalin. In addition, LeVine and her entire writing staff was dismissed, with Robert Singer taking over as show-runner. The show also ended on a cliffhanger when a planned renewal for a fifth season was rescinded by ABC, leaving viewers hanging. Both Cain and Hatcher have appeared on the current Supergirl series, the former as the title character’s adoptive father, the latter as a Daxamite queen.
“I like your costume!”
“Thank you—my mother made it for me…”
Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman
Written by Deborah Joy LeVine
Directed by Robert Butler
Produced by Robert Butler & David Jacobs
Original release date: September 12, 1993
Reporter Lois Lane returns to the Daily Planet in disguise as a bearded man, having landed a major scoop. The next day, they celebrate her triumph, though editor-in-chief Perry White eventually makes them go back to work, while refusing Lane a raise by pulling the empty pockets of his pants inside out to show how broke the paper is.
A bus arrives in Metropolis and a young man gets out with a very battered suitcase monogrammed with the initials “CK,” which means either this is Clark Kent or we know what cologne this guy prefers. He sees another bus coming down the street with nonfunctioning brakes. He steps in front of it and stops it with his hand. There’s only one witness (plus there’s a hand-shaped indentation in the front of the bus), and she’s stunned.
Kent has an interview with White. While White is impressed with his recommendation from an old colleague, and with the breadth of Kent’s experiences travelling the world, he doesn’t have a job for him.
Kent returns to his crummy hotel, calling his parents back home in Smallville to tell them the disappointing news. His father offers to wire him some money, and warns him about using his powers in public, lest he be taken by government scientists who try to dissect him like a frog. He also paces around the room on the walls and ceiling, and uses his powers of flight to tighten the flickering light bulb.
Walking around Metropolis, he sees that an old theatre is being demolished, despite protestors. There’s an old woman wearing an absurd hat inside the theatre reciting lines from Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard while the demolition crew is blithely about to knock the building down. Kent uses his heat vision to sabotage the wrecking equipment and then talks to the woman for a bit. He then writes a rather clichéd puff piece about how sad this poor old woman is who is reciting Chekhov after a long career in theatre (no mention in the article of the hat, which strikes me as a wasted opportunity). Somehow, this prompts White to give him a job as a reporter.
There’s a space shuttle launch that is going to link up with the Prometheus space station, where important zero-g research is being done. However, the project has been fraught with problems, and there is concern that they’ll have to scrub the entire project. A crazy homeless guy comes into the Planet insisting that the shuttle is doomed—doomed!—and they need to expose it. Further investigation reveals that he’s Dr. Samuel Platt, who worked on the project, and who claims his reports of problems with the shuttle were ignored.
White reluctantly lets Lane run with the story, but instead of a task force, he gives her Kent. She’s not thrilled, but they do investigate. Dr. Antoinette Baines of the Prometheus Project has no recollection of any reports of problems.
Lane has been trying to get an interview with the reclusive industrialist Lex Luthor for years now. She’s attending his annual gala, and is hoping to corner him there. She does, however, need a plus-one. She eventually asks Kent, emphasizing that it’s not a date. (Though she was somewhat charmed by his finding really good Chinese food—he actually flew to China and brought it back.)
Kent saves a man trapped in a sewer. His father is concerned about him exposing himself, and he hits on the notion of a disguise.
At Luthor’s gala, he announces his own privately funded space station, which he’s offered to the Congress of Worlds in place of Prometheus. Upon realizing that Lane is incredibly hot, he decides that maybe he should return her phone calls, and he starts hitting on her. At one point, Lane and Kent sneak into his back office, and Luthor is surprisingly blasé about it. He shows Kent a sword that supposedly belonged to Alexander the Great, with Luthor saying that Alexander’s secret was to always have the high ground. He also shows Kent and Lane the balcony and the amazing view, as he has the tallest skyscraper in Metropolis—he likes the notion of everyone looking up at him.
Luthor is also sleeping with Baines, who is sabotaging Prometheus on his behalf so he can have his private space station. Baines wants to get Lane, Kent, and Platt out of the way, but Luthor says that he’ll deal with Lane. His method of doing that is to invite her to dinner, at which he tries to sleep with her and she tries to interview him, and both of them wind up frustrated. Kent also follows them discreetly from Luthor’s place back to Lane’s apartment, and then he hovers outside her window, which isn’t at all creepy (it’s totally creepy).
Lane and Kent find Platt dead in his home, a seeming suicide, but neither reporter believes that. Lane decides to check out the Prometheus base, taking Jimmy Olsen with her. They miss a staff meeting, and Kent decides to investigate.
Olsen is clubbed from behind by Baines’s pet thug, and while Lane is able to take him down temporarily, Baines shows up with a gun. Kent arrives soon thereafter, but decides not to use his powers so openly, and so he and Lane are chained to a pole. At one point, Baines makes a comment about having the high ground which sounds very much like what Luthor said at the party.
Baines lets loose a gas that will kill them. However, Kent breaks his bonds (claiming to Lane that there was a missing link in the chain), and gets himself, Lane, and the semi-conscious Olsen out before the place blows up.
When they get out—Kent using his flying powers to bring them clear of the blast, though he credits the force of the explosion—they look up to see Baines in a helicopter, which then explodes. Luthor watches security footage of the helicopter exploding with glee, as he ordered it done. Luthor also at one point stares down a cobra put in his sitting room by a turban-wearing employee.
Despite the explosion, the Congress of Worlds announces that they are going forward with Prometheus, which pisses Luthor off no end.
There’s a celebration at the Planet, as Lane has written the full story of Baines’s mendacity. The shuttle launch is going ahead, with lots of folks going to the space station.
Kent goes home to Smallville asking his mother to fire up her sewing machine. He wants a separate identity, one that can show off his powers to the world without endangering Clark Kent’s real life. After several false starts, they settle on a red-and-blue outfit. She puts a stylized “S” medallion that was amidst the stuff they found with him when his rocket ship crashed on the chest of the uniform.
The shuttle launches, but there’s a hold because a circuit is broken. It was broken by Lane, as it happens, who snuck on board the shuttle and found a bomb. She cut a wire to stop the launch.
Superman arrives and swallows the bomb. He then flies the shuttle to Prometheus, since the rockets can’t be reused so soon after the abortive blast-off. Superman then flies Lane back to the Planet from the orbital station (how he did that without her dying of asphyxiation in orbit is left as an exercise for the viewer).
Lane insists on an exclusive interview as he flies off. Later, Superman shows up at Luthor’s window, saying he knows that Luthor was responsible, even though he can’t prove it. He adds that if Luthor wants to know where he is, to look up. (Burn!)
“You are a strange one, Clark Kent”
Mainstream Hollywood has always been a peculiar mix of progressive and conservative. On the one hand, we saw a U.S. president that wasn’t a white male on our TV and movie screens way before we saw one in real life, and screen productions’ integration of the first half of the LGBT community into the mainstream was a big help in getting the average American to accept homosexuals. But most family relationships on screen are almost depressingly traditional, and the BT part of LGBT is still marginalized, forgotten, and/or used as code to show that someone is depraved and evil (ditto the BDSM community).
Lois & Clark is an interesting look at where sex relationships stood in the “post-feminist” 1990s, having gone through the women’s lib movement of the late 1960s and 1970s and the conservative backlash of the Reagan years: to wit, a big ol’ mess. On the one hand, Teri Hatcher’s Lois Lane is portrayed as a go-getter, as a hard-willed, takes-no-prisoners reporter who is as tough as any man—tougher, even. On the other hand, we see her alone in her apartment crying while watching a sappy romantic movie, and people around her, particularly her rival Cat Grant and her sister, keep trying to convince her that all she really needs is a man, and her life will be complete. Part of it is, of course, the very premise of the Superman mythos, the “love triangle” among Lane, Kent, and Superman. And it’s not surprising that in the Ally McBeal era of television, we see this dichotomy between the traditional woman who only needs a man to be complete and a woman who’s an accomplished person in her own right and that really should be enough for society, dammit. (Ironically, the star of Ally McBeal, Calista Flockhart, would go on two decades later to play a much more compelling version of Cat Grant than the unsubtle “man-eater” sexually prolific living stereotype played very poorly by Tracey Scoggins here.)
Lois & Clark threads that needle very clumsily, and 25 years on, it’s almost painful to watch.
Having said that, the movie and its followup series do have their charms, starting with the two stars. For all that Hatcher has a mess to work with, she makes Lane surprisingly compelling. And Dean Cain is charming as heck as Kent (and briefly Superman). A lot of why the show worked for so long was the spectacular chemistry between the two, with Cain’s relaxed charm a good match for Hatcher’s biting commentary. In addition, I like that they lean into the fact that Superman isn’t just faster and stronger, but also smarter—and we get a Clark Kent who’s travelled the breadth of the world he’s sworn to protect. Cain’s Kent isn’t just a bright smile and a great physique, he’s also intelligent, and not in an overbearing way.
We also have in Lane Smith and John Shea, the best interpretations of Perry White and Lex Luthor in live action (with the possible exception of Michael Rosenbaum’s Luthor on Smallville). Smith gives White a Southern drawl that softens the character’s bluster a bit, but still has the avuncular mien and hardass journalistic instincts that make him a good chief. And Shea truly embodies the Byrne/Wolfman version of Luthor that has been the comics’ norm for thirty years: the businessman who is publicly good but privately evil. Shea’s charisma is perfect for the role, oozing charm and menace in equal measure—you have no trouble believing that most people think well of him, but you also have no trouble predicting that he’s going to kill Baines and enjoy watching the footage over and over again.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the truly fine performances of K Callan and Eddie Jones. The best thing John Byrne ever did in a storied comics career was to change Superman’s mythos so that his parents remained alive and part of his life into adulthood. In both the comics and the on-screen adaptations, this has mostly been a boon to the character and to the storytelling. (Why I qualify that with “mostly” is something we’ll get into next week.) And Callan and Jones are a magnificent double-act of concern, love, and affection.
The script devolves into camp on more than one occasion, from the extreme stakes of the Prometheus station and the consequences if one shuttle doesn’t take off, to Luthor staring down a cobra provided by his ethnic stereotype henchman, plus the only reason Baines doesn’t kill Kent, Lane, and Olsen directly is because they’re the stars of the show and she’s not allowed to. Having said that, I love that Kent regularly uses his powers as part of his everyday life, not just when he’s superheroing, something we see far too rarely. He unconsciously floats into the air when he’s agitated about Luthor flirting with Lane, he flies to adjust a light bulb, he flies to China for takeout.
This is a flawed movie in many ways, problematic in several ways, but a lot of fun in a few other ways. It’s rather aggressively a product of its time, with both the good and bad that entails.
Next week, we shift from the 1990s interpretation of the man of steel to the 2013 movie Man of Steel, as we inaugurate our look at the DC Extended Universe.
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be at Planet Comic-Con in Kansas City from the 29th to the 31st of March. He’ll be spending most of his time at the Bard’s Tower booth, so come by and say hi, and buy lots of copies of his books, especially his new releases A Furnace Sealed (debuting a new urban fantasy series) and Mermaid Precinct (the latest in his fantasy police procedure series).
Teri Hatcher will always be my Lois Lane!
“the first live-action, radio, and animated adaptations of superheroes featured the man of steel”
You’re right about radio and animated as far as I know, but Superman was far from the first superhero to hit live-action. The first was 1941’s Adventures of Captain Marvel serial, followed by serials based on Batman and The Phantom in 1943 and Captain America (very loosely) in 1944. Superman didn’t hit live action until 1948, and was also preceded by serials based on non-superhero comic book characters Spy Smasher, Hop Harrigan, and The Vigilante, not to mention two Green Hornet serials and four serials and four features based on Dick Tracy.
I’d also add that Robert Singer was only showrunner for season 2. Seasons 3-4 were run by Eugenie Ross-Leming and Brad Buckner, who took the show in a campier, more comedic direction.
I liked the first two seasons of Lois & Clark; season 1 did the best work with the characters, but season 2 found a better balance of romantic comedy and superhero action, the latter of which was a lower priority in season 1. I never found Dean Cain entirely convincing as Superman, in particular because it was immediately obvious that he had the same face and voice as Clark Kent, even more so than usual for Superman actors other than Christopher Reeve and Bud Collyer. But otherwise the cast was mostly pretty good in the context of the broad, slightly cheesy ’90s writing and performance style they were working with. Although I feel sorry for Tracy Scoggins, who got saddled with a frustratingly one-note version of Cat Grant who was almost never allowed to be more than a walking joke about sexual insatiability, and who was constantly slut-shamed for it.
One of the best things about season 1 was Michael Landes as a cool, streetwise Jimmy Olsen. It was frustrating when they arbitrarily replaced him in season 2 with Justin Whalin, who conformed more to the Jack Larson/Marc McClure nerdy school of Jimmys and who was utterly bland and uninteresting compared to Landes’s charm.
My absolute favorite thing about L&C, though, was Jay Gruska’s theme music for the show. It’s my favorite Superman theme of all time. Another thing that annoyed me about seasons 2 and after was that they added sound effects on top of the music, including the noise of Superman smashing through a wall right on top of the most stirring “Bum-bum-bumm” sting in the music. Arrgh.
I remember very little about this show except that even for TV of its time it always felt like it was produced on the cheap. Teri Hatcher and Dean Cain were OK, but the writing was often more soap operatic even than the CW superhero shows of the current day. Not my cup of tea at all.
Love, love, love season 1 of Lois and Clark so much, partly because most of the cast was so excellent. Hatcher and Cain made their eponymous show, and Shea is the definitive Luthor to me. I was sad to see Landes leave as I preferred his Jimmy Olsen. And of course the Kents were played to perfection.
I kind of feel like this show worked best when it showed off Superman the least. The effects weren’t all that snazzy back then and had trouble doing superpowers justice. Exterior sets also weren’t all that realistic looking.
I enjoyed this show white a bit. Dean Cain was really pretty to look at, and I liked his easy charm. My favorite part about it was that it seemed to me that Clark was the person, and Superman was the character (which seemed the opposite of the Reeves’ movies in the 80’s), which he had to work to get more comfortable with as time went on.
@5/sarrow: What you’re saying ties into what Keith said about L&C following the lead of the John Byrne reboot continuity. The pre-reboot comics had treated Superman (or Kal-El of Krypton) as the real identity (since he had total recall going back to infancy) and Clark as merely an act he put on, but Byrne decided that he would grow up thinking of himself as a human named Clark Kent, discover his powers and origin as he matured, and only adopt the Superman persona as an adult. And that’s the model that’s been followed by most subsequent versions, from L&C to Smallville to Man of Steel.
sarrow: both interpretations reflected the comics of the time. Before the 1986 reboot, the Kent of the comics was a performance. Afterward, it was closer to his true personality.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I fall right in line here; Lois & Clark is “my” Superman show much as the ’60s Batman series is my Batman, even if L&C hasn’t aged quite as well. I wholly agree with the consensus that Shea is the best live-action Luthor we have (with Rosenbaum a very close second, hampered mostly by the fact that the writing for Lex’s character in later seasons of Smallville was staggeringly inconsistent). And I likewise agree with the gallery on vastly preferring Landes’ Jimmy Olsen to Justin Whalen’s.
As to the alleged cheesiness of the sets and SFX: I seem to remember reading somewhere that at least where the set design was concerned, this was something of a deliberate choice, with the bright color schemes being a nod in the direction of the Adam West Batman run, or at least to the idea that this was an idealized comic-book universe rather than a wholly realistic one.
On a different note, relative to the matter of superheroes on the silver screen: by pure coincidence, I have on my desk at this very moment a DVD release of Mandrake the Magician — a 12-chapter serial dated to 1939 whose description reads very much like that of a Batman or Green Hornet caper (and if Mandrake wasn’t precisely a “super”hero in his earliest comic strip incarnation, he’s certainly become one in the intervening decades). [I had been looking online for a release of the 1979 TV pilot movie, starring Anthony Herrera, but that version seems not to have had a disc issued.]
This show had its issues, but it was the first modern adaptation of Superman, and as a fan of the Byrne run, I welcomed it. Plus, I loved the scenes of Clark talking on the phone to both of his parents. Cain as Clark was very good, his warmth and earnestness were quite endearing.
The Bonnie Tyler costume making montage is glorious.
@2 – Chris: I didn’t remember the theme, so I went to listen to it on YouTube… and turns out I did remember it, but not as this show’s intro song. A radio show here in Uruguay used the theme for yeears as music for the “behind the scenes documentaries” for the comedy radio serials they do.
@8/John C. Bunnell: On live-action Lexes, I’d say Rosenbaum is the best. Shea was good as his version of Luthor, but it’s always been hard for me to quite reconcile to the idea of Lex Luthor as a slim, handsome guy with a full head of hair. I also thought Sherman Howard in the syndicated Superboy was an excellent Luthor, and Jon Cryer made a hell of an impressive debut in the role in Supergirl last week. (Gene Hackman was also excellent, but conceptually his character was a very, very poor version of Luthor.)
@9/MaGnUs: Always weird when a TV show theme song gets co-opted by a news show or the like. Randy Edelman’s theme for Bruce Campbell’s one-season wonder The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. had far more longevity as the theme for NBC’s Olympics and general sports coverage in later years. But I’m sure NBC paid to license the theme — I hope that radio show did too.
Around here, Lois & Clark reruns aired adjacent to Babylon 5 episodes. Back in 1998, it was bizarre to see Tracy Scoggins play two diametrically opposed characters within the hour.
Regarding Jimmy Olsen, I think it was the first time in my life I ever noticed a role being so blatantly recast midway through a show’s run.
I did appreciate the soundtrack. Superman adaptations come and go at various degress of quality, but the main theme is usually a winner. This is no exception. It’s as good as the 1996 animated Superman theme. And the show carried the upbeat, optimistic tone throughout, which I always felt to be an essential aspect of Superman.
Since I actually saw this show prior to any of the Christopher Reeve movies, I was appalled to discover that Jonathan Kent had died, which I learned in 2006, thanks to Smallville. I had no idea otherwise. Prior to that, I was always under the impression that the senior Kents were an everyday presence in Clark’s life (I never read the comics, let alone the older ones).
I was a kid when this show was on the air and I watched it religiously. I realize now that it’s kind of a goofy soap opera, but for kid-me this was a live action superhero show on TV! I focused on the villains (I remember getting so excited when Mr. Myxzptlk played by Howie Mandel showed up!) and the powers, not the romantic aspects.
I liked Jonathan Kent being alive in this show. His death adds nothing to the Superman story. It’s not like Batman’s parents or Spiderman’s uncle, which are integral to the reason the character becomes a superhero. Actually it can be said to be the other way. Elseworlds tales with Superman sometimes put into question whether he’d be the same person if raised differently. It’s the case of Red Sun, in which Kal-El is raised in Soviet Ukraine, and Justice League: Gods and monsters, in which the kryptonian that comes to Earth is Zod’s son, and he’s raised by Mexican American illegal immigrants. So the Superman we see, and most of us like, the boy scout, exists due to being raised by the Kents, and would go out superheroing regardless of what happened to Papa Kent.
Eduardo: Scoggins actually can act, though I didn’t believe it for a very long time. Honestly, it was her turn on Crusade that convinced me, since my prior exposures to her were Lois & Clark, where she was terrible (but in her defense, she was horrifically written), Highlander: The Series, where she was terrible (especially in her first appearance, where she was MacLeod’s childhood wet dream made flesh; her second appearance actually used that awful first appearance to a good story end), and Babylon 5‘s final season, where she was boring (but in her defense, she was replacing the irreplaceable, as almost anybody following Claudia Christian’s Ivanova would have suffered in comparison). On Crusade — which I honestly hated and did not miss when it was cancelled — she got to stand on her own rather than be Ivanova’s replacement, and she came across better.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I grew up with Smallville so, I have only a “vague” notion of this show. Dean Cain showed up in Smallville as Curtis Knox aka Vandal Savage, Teri Hatcher as Lois’s mom Ella Lane.
@11/Eduardo: The disposition of Ma and Pa Kent has gone through a lot of changes over the decades. Let’s see, I think the earliest versions of Superman’s origin had him coming to Metropolis after both his parents had died. The origin that George Lowther established for the radio series and 1940s prose novel, which carried through into the George Reeves series (whose pilot episode was an almost verbatim adaptation of the radio scripts telling the origin story), was that Pa Kent died of a heart attack and Clark then chose to leave home and use his powers to help people, as Ma implored him. (They were called Eben and Sarah Kent in that version.) In the Silver and Bronze Age comics (’50s to mid-’80s), the Kents both died of a weird alien disease while Clark was still Superboy. The Donner film essentially went with the Lowther origin, though with the names Jonathan and Martha that they’d been given in Superboy comics.
Then Byrne introduced the idea of the Kents still being alive and well in the present, since he realized people had longer life expectancy by then and it was more common for adults to have both parents alive. That lasted for the next couple of decades in both comics and screen adaptations, until Smallville resurrected the “Jonathan dies of a heart attack in Clark’s teens” version from the movie. Some years after that, the comics had Jonathan die of a heart attack in the present. And then the “New 52” reboot in 2011 apparently went back to the Kents both being dead, this time due to a drunk driver. I was rather surprised to read that on Wikipedia just now.
Anyway, I agree that having Ma and Pa as active parts of Clark/Superman’s adult life is a good choice. It’s good for him to have trusted confidantes like that, and the stable nuclear family life fits well with Superman’s wholesome persona. Besides, he already has one set of dead parents, so cut the poor guy a break.
I had the somewhat dubious privilege of seeing ‘ Superboy’ filmed as my alma mater, the University of Central Florida, turned in a solid performance as a college. I looked out the library window and saw Superboy hovering next to the Humanities building. And experienced a moment of meta angst before spotting the crane and camera crew.
Clark gets the job at the Planet not so much because of the piece itself but for the initiative he showed in getting it: Perry had assigned the piece to Lois & she hadn’t gotten it. Clark was in the room for his interview when Perry & Lois discussed the matter.
I rather liked Cat Grant. There were a few times when it looked like they were planning on developing her further, but then the writing and production team was changed and she was dropped.
I still haven’t forgiven ABC for the change.
@10 – Chris: Radios here pay a fee to the composers’ and musicians’ union, which in turn (don’t ask me how they calculate it), distribute and pay royalties to local and international authors and musicians according to the amount of airplay each got. So I’m sure the L&C composers got their monies.
I’ll just say this the best on the small screen Lex Luthor is the one from the ’90’s animated series
I think in Action Comics #1 it was stated that he was adopted by an “elderly couple.” Interpret that how you will, but it would make more sense that way for them to have died before adulthood. If you have a version where they’re younger, then they can be kept alive.
Nothing wrong with that, all tv benefits from a bit of camp and cheese to prevent them turning into dour tedium. It is what makes a show charming and worth smiling at.
I loved this show at the time, it was so 90s. I can’t think of many other shows which so perfectly encapsulate the era. It also had the best episode title ever when Clark and Lois finally tied the knot with “Swear to God this time we’re not kidding” as it acknowledged that they’d been fanteasing and dragging things out for far too long.
Really the only thing that spoils it is that S1 episode with the female Ninja who is stronger than Superman because ninja! And the age old debate about separating creator from product, with Dean Cain having turned out to be a massive complete and utter prick in real life. That does taint it, but the 90s were so long ago I can let it go more than I can with more recent productions.
Incidentally, that radio show is called “Justicia Infinita”, and it was named back in 2001 after “Operation Infinite Justice”, the original name of “Operation Enduring Freedom”. Most people here only remember the radio show name, and not its origin.
@20 I attributed much of the great success of the DCAU characterization of Lex Luthor to Clancy Brown’s voice-acting, perfectly combining the charm and menace that was needed for the role.
This show in combination with Babylon 5 were my 90’s faves. I even was on the set of both shows on subsequent days in 1994.
The original broadcast of the pilot was shortened to accommodate a celebrity special that aired the same night, so what is available on the DVDs and streaming is the full version (which aired as a two part event in reruns at the time). Both versions had different takes/cuts of some of the same scenes, even. So the first time I saw the full original pilot was when I got a copy converted from a UK PAL tape.
The fandom of the show was very active online (FOLCs – Friends of Lois and Clark) and Teri Hatcher and K Callan even participated in the online chats on a regular basis. The FOLCs organized a group outing to tour the Warner Bros. studio, and we were surprised to end the tour on the Daily Planet set and got to chat with K, Teri, Dean, and Justin (who we had not yet seen on the show) . Teri was very excited to meet some of the fans and attach faces to the online names she knew. K also joined us at a the hotel the group was staying at for a party.
While Straczynski was very active online related to Babylon 5, Lois and Clark was one of the first shows where some of the actors interacted with the fans online.
templarsteel: the live-action caveat for my declaration of Shea’s superiority was necessary mainly for Clancy Brown, though James Marsters, Jason Isaacs, and Rainn Wilson in particular have done well with the voice role in animation also.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@17/roxana: It sounds like a cool experience to glance out your window and just see Superman (well, -boy) hovering there. To believe, just for a moment…
This show affected comics in an important way. Since the timing of the wedding between Lois Lane and Clark Kent in comics had to wait until it happened as well in the TV show (due to executive meddling, they always want the comics to reflect live media to raise sales or to not confuse newcomers) the comic writers had to come up with a story to fill up the gap, since the TV writers took their damn time to make it happen in the series (as others have mentioned, they teased a lot about it, with the marriage being interrupted in a lot of ways over several episodes). So the comic writers got the concept of killing Superman, and “The Death of Superman” was born. It was the first big event comic I collected and I remember it fondly. So thanks for that, Lois&Clark!
@14 – krad: Crusade was bad, but at least it wasn’t Thirdspace.
#10/#20/#24/#26:
Agreed that there’s been a lot of quality work among the animated-Lex voice acting pool, Clancy Brown’s arguably the strongest (though for reasons I still don’t quite recall, I saw very little of Superman:TAS on its original run as compared to Batman:TAS).
As to Shea vs. Rosenbaum in live action: whereas both actors were remarkably ill-served by later seasons’ writing staffs, I find Rosenbaum harder to watch because he made the choice to attempt to act his way through most of the hash the scripts were making of Lex’s character…and at the end of the day, the sum of the inconsistent writing was just too muddled to let him shine through. Mind you, the L&C arc that finally did turn Shea’s Lex bald was very nearly as badly scripted — but it was also over in far fewer episodes, and Shea (wisely, I think) left the role thereafter.
What I like most about Shea’s performance, though, is that whereas he convinces you over the first season or so that Lex is wholly, almost gleefully amoral, he also convinces you that he really and truly loves Lois Lane…and that there’s that tiniest bit of hope that that love might just redeem him if given the chance. That, to me, gives Shea’s version of Luthor just enough of a genuinely tragic quality to elevate the series’ dramatic arc, and there are one or two moments in the series when this aspect of the Lex/Lois/Clark/Supes quadrangle comes to the fore just brilliantly. (And then the writers royally screwed things up, but these things happen in network TV.) By contrast, the wonky roller-coaster ride that is Lex’s thing for Lana in Smallville is merely creepy and wildly uneven in execution all around.
Meanwhile, I am sadly behind on Supergirl, and clearly need to catch up thereon soonest.
@27, it was cool, but at the moment itself all I could think was why couldn’t it be Star Wars instead of Superman! :-D
@28/Ryamano: The ridiculous plot convolutions to delay the Lois-Clark wedding were one of the many things that deeply irritated me about seasons 3-4. My problem with romance-driven series is the need to constantly put the couple in contrived perils one after the other to keep them from being happy, and L&C was perhaps the most blatant example I’d ever seen. Plus it was just pretty dumb overall by that point. I got the feeling that Ross-Leming and Buckner didn’t respect the material — that they saw the superhero genre as ridiculous and wrote the show accordingly. I liked their work much better on the earlier Scarecrow and Mrs. King, a more effective romantic/workplace comedy/action show (with Bruce Boxleitner as a relatively realistically portrayed CIA agent and Kate Jackson as his civilian love interest), so it’s a shame they couldn’t do L&C on the same level.
@30/John: I do think Shea was effective; it’s just that he’s such a revisionist version of Lex Luthor that I kind of have to list him with an asterisk in my mind. Also, he was a little broad, but so was the show overall, I guess.
@31/roxana: Whatever its merits to watch, I’d think the Star Wars universe would be a pretty terrible place to live in — the galaxy is often under the rule of one tyranny or another, your planet could get blown up at any moment, slavery is a thing, there are all sorts of high places without safety railings, there doesn’t seem to be much to read, and nobody in this civilization with sentient AIs and routine FTL travel has ever figured out how to create an undistorted, full-color, HD video image. ;)
I admit the high places without railings are a deal breaker for me. :-(
Lois and Clarke was never quite the same after John Shea left – he was a great villain, and only a few others in the series really managed to strike the right note (Tempus, of course, was the exception – he was great!).
Nice to see the shout-out to the live-action Superboy – I liked the Lex in that series as well (and the episode with three different versions of Superboy).
I don’t know about the series, but the pilot at least was apparently shot in 1:85:1 widescreen. I remember reading about this in a contemporary magazine; as I recall it was J. Michael Straczynski who revealed this information. It stuck in my mind as Babylon 5 was well-known for being shot in widescreen.
I was a little incredulous about this also being the case for Lois & Clark, but there’s a pilot presentation featurette on the first season DVD set which clearly shows scenes from the pilot in a 1:85:1 framing, with more visible picture on the left and right side. I do wonder if further episodes were also shot widescreen; there are occasional effects shots in the first season which look as if they were rendered widescreen and then compressed to 4:3, but this could just as easily be due to poor video compositing.
For me, the first two seasons were the best, even with the behind-the-scenes overhaul between seasons, although John Shea’s Luthor as a regular was sorely missed. Watching the series again recently, the camp factor is very noticeably increased at the start of season 3.
This show had its ups and downs, but is my favorite live action incarnation of the character, primarily because of the good chemistry between the leads. My favorite screen incarnations, however, are the cartoons, both the Fleischer cartoons from the 1940s, and Superman: The Animated Series.
I disagree that the death of the Kents adds nothing to Superman’s story. In the Silver and Bronze Ages, when Superman’s powers were at their highest peak, “With all my powers, I couldn’t save them” is the moment Clark recognizes his limitations. It’s not a coincidence that this is about when he stops being Superboy and becomes Superman. That line is echoed in the Reeve movie for much the same reason: Clark may have powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, but he’s not God.
(And never mind whether he could in fact have saved Jonathan as he later did Lois. One firm limit in the comics was that Superman couldn’t change the past.)
The post-Byrne version is a very different character in many ways (as the Silver/Bronze Age version is from the Golden), and the Kents being alive worked well with that character in the comics, DCAU, and here. But it’s a different ensemble telling a different story, not a fix of a previously flawed or gratuitous detail.
Christopher: There is absolutely nothing “revisionist” about Shea’s Luthor except insofar as he has hair. Otherwise, he’s the same as the Byrne/Wolfman version that has been the character’s status quo for three decades.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@37/mschiffe: Life isn’t binary. Saying that one thing (having the Kents alive in the present) is good does not equal saying that every alternative is bad. I prefer having the Kents alive, yes, but that’s not the same as saying that there’s zero merit in the other approach.
While I love superheroes in general and enjoying watching their cinematic-related efforts, when it comes to television adaptations I almost always fall into a certain pattern: I’ll check out the first episode or two and then I tune out pretty much permanently (Legion currently airing on FX is a huge exception – love that show!). So likewise, I initially tuned into Lois & Clark because of familiarity and affection for the characters (based primarily on the Christopher Reeve movies) and what I found was something that felt very low-budget, low-stakes, more like a soap opera, and pretty silly. Yes, Hatcher and Cain definitely shined. I recall this series initially being popular with the teenager crowd as I was in high school at the time. Hatcher, I was familiar with from her minor guest role in “The Outrageous Okona” on ST:TNG and the movie Soapdish which I found hilarious at the time. I was familiar with Scoggins from Dynasty which I loved as a kid and I liked her guest role on ST:DS9 where she plays a Cardassian smitten with Chief O’Brien. And I remember being excited to see Denise Crosby in a guest role (in the second season) because I was always curious to see what she was up to post-Tasha Yar. And that’s basically all I got. But yeah, this series is definitely a reflection of the post-feminist era and probably feels so dated if watched today.
GHiller: Soapdish is one of my favorite movies.
“Of course I’m an egomaniac! I’ve got America’s sweetheart climbing up my drainpipe!”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@krad – Haha. I said I found it hilarious at the time because I haven’t seen it in probably close to two decades! And I also say “at the time” because I saw it mentioned in an article relatively recently that listed it among several other films that in today’s era it’s tone-deaf to the LGBT community, particularly the “T” part. You know, the reveal about Montana Moorehead? Nonetheless, I just watched some clips on YouTube and I can still see its charm and the talented cast is clearly having fun.
I’m with @36 Alan Brown — this show “is my favorite live action incarnation of the character[s], primarily because of the good chemistry between the leads.” I would even put them above Reeve and Kidder on that level. I loved it in every season and was sorry when it ended. And K Callan and Eddie Jones were the best Kents ever.
Ah, the memories. This incredibly managed to get a prime-time Saturday evening showing on BBC1 during an era when there wasn’t much of that about, so is pretty well known for my generation. (Infamously, the title was shortened to The New Adventures of Superman over here, so I tend to use that half of the title more than the other.) It took me an age to actually get around to seeing the pilot, especially all the way through. It’s a decent set-up, and the lack of screen-time for Superman is kind of in-keeping with the series. Clark Kent being portrayed seriously, as someone that Lois could love for himself rather than because he turns into Superman every now and then, was something of a new one for me. One big problem I’ve always had with the pilot though is that it’s never explained how Lois manages to get on board the shuttle at the end. She’s just there, as if the writers wanted to have her present for the climax and Superman’s first public appearance but couldn’t work out a decent reason why, so instead imply that the shuttle is so completely lacking in security that any old reporter can just walk into it minutes before launch. (Lois’ ability to breathe in space when she’s with Superman becomes even more blatant in later episodes, where she’s shown not only breathing but having a conversation with him in space. Yeah.)
I’ve always had very mixed feelings about John Shea being a regular on the first season. Lex Luthor’s a great villain, but having him be behind nearly every plot for a year, and having Superman continually be unable to expose or truly defeat him solely because he needs to be around next week, grated badly after a while. Having your hero reduced, as he is here, to picking up a few flunkies and making sure the damage isn’t greater than it could have been, while the villain sips champagne in his penthouse having got away with murder and sometimes even profited from his villainy wasn’t really dramatically satisfying. In essence, he was an arc villain in an episodic show and finally exposing him at the end of the season was long overdue.
I don’t really have any favourites between Michael Landes and Justin Whalin, although Whalin was obviously there a lot longer, and possibly it took a while for some people to find the show, so I know a lot of people consider him the “real” Jimmy. I’ve heard a lot of reasons for the change, spanning from them wanting someone younger, to Landes looking too much like Dean Cain, and we’ll possibly never know. But gosh, that non-wedding arc in Season 3 killed the show. I remember them publicising this three-part wedding story and being surprised that Clark and Lois got married in part one (shown over here the same bank holiday weekend as the Doctor Who TV Movie, trivia fans!), only to get the reveal that the Lois he’d married was a clone. That was fine, it was only part one, the real wedding’s still to come, right? Er, no, because suddenly Lois gets amnesia, and dates her creepy psychiatrist for an episode, and then just spends the rest of the season calling Clark her fiance without showing any sign of actually getting married, before we got a throwaway wedding at the start of Season 4 as if to say “Pfft, okay, there you go.” (Mind you, I believe their comic counterparts had one of the longest engagements in history around that time, so I guess it was in-keeping!)
A shame because up until then Season 3 was firing on all cylinders. I remember watching the premiere completely unspoiled at a convention, sitting through an endless pre-credit reprise of the end of Season 2 with Clark proposing to Lois, and then instead of the expected yes or no…she takes off his glasses and goes “Who’s asking, Clark or Superman?” The jaws of everyone in the room hit the floor: It was 1995 and we’d never seen anything like this before.
I missed (most) of the first season until catching up when TNT aired the reruns, I remember having mixed feelings about the prospects, and somehow had more interest in watching Sea Quest, another hyped sci fi/fantasy show which initially aired against (L and C). I enjoyed it for the most part when I did start watching, though looking back a mixed bag. Had some fun aspects, but others that seemed to cute-sy, and at times couldn’t decide if it was more of an adventure drama, light comedy or romance series. The cast was capable for the most part, though Shea’s performance as Luthor doesn’t stand out to me as he seemingly does to others (maybe only primarily seeing season one in reruns somehow took away that impact though)…@krad supposedly the creative team change for season two was an attempt to give the show a more action/adventure push, and supposedly Michael Landes was replaced because he looked too much like a younger Clark. Also hard to say this show was Ally Mcabeal era as from what I remember L&C was cancelled just before Ally premiered…As for Ma and Pa Kent, they had always been depicted as elderly (50s to 70s perhaps) and I recall in the Superboy stories something about their somehow coming to becoming younger in some convoluted way shortly after adopting Clark. Byrne’s take aged them in normal (for the time) child bearing age when finding Kal-El, and I also recall some references to the Kents on L&C being in their late 30’s/early 40’s when finding Clark…
I remember there’s a time travel episode showing the Kents finding Clark, which conspicuously fails to make Eddie Jones and K Callan look 30 or so years younger.
What I remember about this show was the pre-air promotions for it largely obscured that the “Clark” in the title was Superman, instead emphasizing the romantic dramedy storyline. It is hard for there to be a relationship story if you make one of your leads totally unsusceptible to romance. On top of the fact that “live to work” exclusively is an unhealthy way to live for most people.
Then there are Lois’s shoulder pads in the first season, she looked like she was suiting up to play linebacker.
What Shea’s Luthor gets wrong canonically is that when Luthor has hair, he is a redhead. If memory serves, comic book Luthor around the time had been sporting long locks and a full beard.
“Mainstream”, by definition, means trying to reach as broad an audience as possible, which explains any “weird” mixes of attitudes.
GHiller: Yeah, that particular ending was one I never liked even back then, though it would still be an issue for a soap star in 1991. Playing it for laughs was oogy.
Whoopi Goldberg’s writer was probably the best part of the movie. “How am I supposed to write for a guy who doesn’t have a head? He’s got no lips, no vocal cords!”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@40/GHiller: “…more like a soap opera…”: Indeed, the original idea was to do it more as a romantic comedy than a superhero action show, since superhero shows weren’t considered respectable back then. The initial pitch was to do a workplace-centric show about Lois and Clark as reporters, in which Superman was talked about but didn’t actually appear onscreen. That didn’t go over, of course, so Deborah Joy Levine went ahead and did a show that included Superman, yet still focused less on him than on Clark’s civilian life. (Not unlike earlier superhero shows; George Reeves generally spent more screen time as Clark Kent than as Superman, and Lynda Carter spent most of her screen time in seasons 2-3 of Wonder Woman as Diana Prince — though not in season 1, which was more comics-faithful.) When Robert Singer took over in season 2, he shifted the balance more toward Superman and supervillain-driven stories.
@44/cap-mjb: You make a good point about the repetitiveness of Luthor’s villainy in season 1. He was missed in later seasons, but season 2’s mix of multiple comics villains worked better for me than just having Lex be behind everything. It would’ve been nice if he’d stuck around as a recurring presence alongside the other rogues.
” (Mind you, I believe their comic counterparts had one of the longest engagements in history around that time, so I guess it was in-keeping!)”
As Ryamano said in comment #28, it was the other way around. The comics planned to have Clark and Lois get married sooner, but when Lois & Clark came along and focused on the early days of their romance, the comics put the romance in a holding pattern, waiting to marry them off until the show did it. They did the whole “Death of Superman” arc to fill time while they waited for the show’s romance to develop.
And then the show ended up postponing the wedding so long that the comics actually had Clark & Lois break up, which the writers thought made more sense than the perpetual engagement. But then the show reacted to sagging ratings by suddenly having them get married after all, and so the comics had to hastily get Clark & Lois back together and get married within the course of a single issue!
https://www.cbr.com/superman-lois-clark-tv-series-wedding-hurry/
@47/Crusader75: “What Shea’s Luthor gets wrong canonically is that when Luthor has hair, he is a redhead.”
So is Jimmy Olsen, but the only redhead who’s ever played the role in live action was Tommy Bond in the black-and-white Kirk Alyn serials. Every other screen Jimmy has had brown or blond hair. Also, Matt Murdock (Daredevil) is a redhead who’s only been played by brown-haired actors, and Barry Allen (the Flash) is a blond who’s only been played by brown-haired actors.
For some reason, it’s usually only actresses who get their hair dyed to match their comics characters’ color, like Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane, Famke Janssen as Jean Grey, etc. (Amusingly, in Spider-Man 3, the blonde Dunst played the redheaded MJ and the redheaded Bryce Dallas Howard played the blonde Gwen Stacy.) Well, there’s at least one male example — KJ Apa as Archie Andrews in Riverdale. Although they recently did an arc where Archie dyed his red hair to match Apa’s natural color.
@49/CLB: “The comics planned to have Clark and Lois get married sooner, but when Lois & Clark came along and focused on the early days of their romance, the comics put the romance in a holding pattern, waiting to marry them off until the show did it.”
Well, yes, I’m aware of that, but they got engaged in 1990, meaning it had already been over two years before the show started, even if it wasn’t intended to be the six it eventually was! (Makes the show having them engaged for a year seem positively rushed in comparison…) I believe there was some odd communication breakdown where either DC or the network stipulated that Clark and Lois couldn’t get married in Season 3, causing further delays for both the show and the comics.
As an aside, Turban Wearing Man (he had a name but I can’t be bothered to look it up) was one of Luthor’s semi-regular sidekicks who seemed to appear on rotation throughout the first season, and possibly the only one whose fate is unknown: His secretary was arrested when he was exposed at the end of the season, and the sublime Tony Jay’s Nigel St John was shown to still be at large during the second season before being killed in that year’s finale.
@50/cap-mjb: The fellow in the turban was Asabi, played by a young Shaun Toub (later Iron Man‘s Yinsen). After his four appearances in season 1, he returned in one season 3 episode (“Seconds”) as Luthor’s aide once again, and one final time in season 4 (“I’ve Got You Under My Skin”) as a plot device to provide the villain-of-the-week with a leftover piece of Luthor technology.
@51/CLB: Ah, thank you! I have no memory of his later appearances, possibly because I kept missing the later seasons in re-runs! (When they actually got that far…)
@52/cap: I dislike the latter two seasons sufficiently that when I did my Lois & Clark DVD rewatch a while back, I just stopped at the season 2 finale. So I didn’t know Toub had returned until I looked it up just today.
@49/CLB and don’t forget there was the black haired Kristen Kruek playing red head Lana Lang in Smallville, and red headed Amy Adams playing Lois in the DCEU movies…
@54/capt_paul77: Noel Neill, the first (and third) live-action Lois Lane, was also a redhead. So yeah, those are examples where actresses didn’t dye their hair to match the characters. But it’s more common for actresses to dye their hair and male actors not to, for some reason.
@56 I imagine the hair dying thing has something to do with the fact that we still often refer to women by their hair color; blonde, brunette, redhead, etc. Not as much as when I was young, but the habit persists. People in our society still tend to judge women by their physical appearance more than we should.
@56/AlanBrown: To a large extent, yes. Also it’s just that in our culture, women are more likely to change their hair color and experiment with their appearance, so actresses are probably more likely to do so for a role.
Still, you’d think that it’d be different when it comes to a redhead like Jimmy Olsen, because redheads of either sex are uncommon and thus it’s a trait that tends to get focused on. In the comics and animation, Jimmy being a carrot-top is pretty fundamental to who he is (even though he was originally described as blond when he was introduced on radio), so it’s odd that that attribute has never translated to any screen adaptation of the character aside from the one who appeared strictly in black-and-white.
I don’t know if anyone remembers this, but I’m sure I saw an episode of this once that had a werewolf. But I can’t for the life of me find evidence anywhere of it. Have I dreamt this???
The first 2 seasons were good, but the third was bad and the fourth was quite possibly one of the worst seasons of television I’ve ever seen.
I must have agreed, Farlos, as I stopped watching regularly after the second season.
@54 – Um Kristin Kreuk didn’t play a redhead…
You know what, brain fart. Ignore my last comment. It dawned on me a few minutes later that @54 was referring to the comics Lana Lang as having red hair, rather than the actress…
This is the series I always point to when people complain that it’s too hard to write believable interesting conflict in a story with a character with too much power. The key is to put the OP character in situations where their powers do not apply or even make things worse. Making Lois and Clark essentially a rom-com provided a built in source of problems that Superman CANNOT PUNCH. Crush on a coworker and can’t tell if she likes you back or just likes your cool alter ego? CANNOT PUNCH UNRESOLVED SEXUAL TENSION. Struggling to be there for your loved ones when you’re constantly having to fly around the world at a moment’s notice to save earthquake victims in China? CANNOT PUNCH WORK-LIFE BALANCE.
All my favourite Superman moments and stories are the ones that find situations where Clark is on the same footing as a human would be: mysteries where he and Lois need to figure out what’s causing the problem before he can solve it, ethical dilemmas where he doesn’t know what the right thing to do is, relationship struggles, villains who know how to play the PR game and make themselves untouchable. This show did that in spades. Lois and Clark had its flaws, but it was very, VERY good at understanding how to give Clark believable stakes without just flinging kryptonite and larger and larger punchable objects at him.
@63/Nelly Dreadful: I agree that the first season was good at not overusing kryptonite, but later seasons started having it show up in villains’ hands with absurd frequency.
@17 – princessroxana: Wow!
@25 – Lee: That’s a cool story!
I remember liking Lois & Clark when it first started, but I kind of fell off from watching it sometime in season 3, probably. Whenever it was that there was a clone of Lois who ate frogs…
I also prefer the Kents remaining alive into Clark’s adulthood, but I think it depends on the nature of the story you’re telling. For an ongoing story (like comics or a TV series), the Kents being alive allows Clark to have them as a sounding board, and someone he can truly be himself around without having to hide any part of himself as he does when he appears to the rest of the world in either of his identities. However, for a single movie, the idea of Clark having to grapple with the limitations of his power by being unable to save someone from something mundane like a heart attack can be quite powerful. (If you don’t undercut it at the end by having Superman reverse time, that is…)
As for the way Jonathan was killed in Man of Steel, well, I’ll wait until Friday to talk about that. ;)
–Andy
There seems to be a consensus emerging that season 3 was where the show lost its way. Although the season wasn’t entirely without merit. The late-season arc about the surviving Kryptonians was fairly good (and Jay Gruska’s musical leitmotif for their spaceship was terrific). Season 4 was pretty bad, though, and got progressively worse, to the point that it was a relief when it was finally cancelled.
I remember really enjoying all the shout outs in he first few episodes.
Lex: How fas is he? Is he faster than a speeding bullet?
Bystander: What’s that? Is it a bird?
Bystander:Maybe a plane?
Bystander: It’s a guy in red and blue tights.
That whole “It’s a bird! It’s a plane!” thing from the radio/cartoon opening never really made sense. Why do those two people sound so excited about seeing a bird or a plane???
I think the first half of Season 3 is good, but the show lost momentum completely with the turgid Fake-Out Wedding/Clone Lois/Amnesia Lois storyline that dragged on for five episodes and tested the audience’s patience, then followed it up with an extremely mediocre stand-alone episode that could have fitted in anywhere in the season. The penultimate episode was intriguing but I find the finale weak, dispensing with its villain about 15 minutes from the end to fit in an overly sentimental “Oh no, Superman has to leave Earth and Lois behind to help his people” sequence, which becomes even more pointless when you know he comes back about 10 minutes into the next episode. (The BBC actually managed to make it worse by producing a cut-down morning repeat version that took out nearly all the scenes with the alien asssassin (possibly the make-up was considered too horrific for daytime viewing) and leaving it as nothing but OTT soapy scenes.)
On the other hand, I think Season 4 is better than people make out although it does have a fair number of stinkers, including the wedding episode which doesn’t help. Problem is by then they’d lost the audience and there was no getting them back. Although it’s generally held up as part of what killed the show, I actually enjoyed the two-part opener with Lord Nor, and there is something appealing about putting Superman, the guy who always resolves situations peacefully by being the strongest person present, in the role of the commander of an army facing people as strong as him, and seeing how badly suited he is to the role because he won’t allow any collateral damage. I’ve seen the early Tempus reincarnation episode and the Mxyzptlk episode with friends in recentish years and they’re both great fun. I love the two-part Tempus story where he becomes president (which basically got ripped off by the new Doctor Who for their third series finale, arguably to lesser effect!). And even though it’s got a bad reputation and it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it so it might not stand up well, I have fond memories of the three-part Lex Files storyline with Lex Luthor’s heirs trying to regain his empire.
@69: People are excited about seeing something weird in the sky, and making guesses as to what it could be. Is it an unusually large bird with a strange pattern of colors? No. Is it a plane, flying unusually low and fast through a city? No.
Also keep in mind that seeing a plane in the sky wasn’t all that common in 1940……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@72/krad: Your chronology is a bit off. Passenger aviation became a routine thing in the 1920s, and the major airlines were established in the 1930s, with regular national and international flights becoming routine well before 1940. (Remember the red-line travel montages in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was set in 1936?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airliner#History
I wrote this right when Jon Cryer was debuting another version of Lex Luthor on Supergirl. I have not yet seen it (I’m horrendously behind on the CW DC shows), but have heard good things. Any thoughts from folks who have seen it on where Cryer falls among Hackman, Howard, Shea, Rosenbaum, Spacey, and Eisenberg?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@74/krad: It’s only two weeks in, but Cryer’s easily one of the best live-action Luthors ever. The writing helps enormously, because they’ve captured the essentials of the comics’ Luthor from both pre- and post-Crisis better than any adaptation ever has (people are comparing it to Morrison’s All-Star, but I’m reminded of the Luthor from Elliot S! Maggin’s novels). But Cryer easily rises to the level of the material and creates a compelling, malicious, sympathetic, and convincingly Luthorian performance (despite a flubbed line in his first scene where he said an Ancient Greek writer lived 230 years ago rather than 2300). I see people trying to compare him to Hackman or one of the others, but he’s totally made the role his own. I had no idea he was capable of this, since I only knew him vaguely from his earlier comedy work.
Personally, I like what the writers did with the role, adapting modern Luthor while keeping a bit of Hackman camp. But I don’t like (at least in the first episode, haven’t seen the second one) how Cryer portrays it, I don’t see a difference in acting between this and his Two And A Half Men character. Perhaps the latest episode improves in that aspect.
O.f note – Cryer’s Luthor has a Otis sidekick who is an homage to Ned Beatty (though more violent)
@77/AndyLove: Yes, Supergirl has established both Eve Teschmacher and Otis, so of course there are movie nods (although this version of Otis has been established as the brother of Rhona Mitra’s Mercy Graves, a character who originated in Superman: The Animated Series). But I’m talking about how Cryer performs Luthor, not how he’s written. He’s not doing a Hackman impression; he’s doing his own version.
No, he’s definitely not doing a Hackman impression, at least that’s good.
@78: Agreed.
I had a favorite moment with Cat Grant. She’s gotten Clark over to her apartment. Initially, she’s flirting with him but, when Clark becomes uncomfortable, she drops it. For me, the way it was played, I suddenly saw Cat Grant as a persona she used the same way Clark used Superman, professional masks that weren’t lies but weren’t the whole truth either and that were tools both of them used to do a job. I saw her as able to understand Clark’s double life in a way no one else on the show would.
That lasted for about two minutes and they never got back to it, but it was a really good two minutes for her character.
Okay, watched the second Lex Luthor episode on Supergirl. I still don’t like Cryer that much, but the episode was very well-written, a great use of 40 minutes to tell months of story, and a very Lex plan.
@81 – ellynne: True, I remember that now, it was very nice, and it seemed foreshadow that Cat was actually a decent person behind the man-eater persona, as we did get in the comic books. And of course, the Supergirl TV show updated her to a successful businesswoman and media mogul instead of just a vapid gossip columnist.
The lead characters’ relationship in this series reminds me of the lead characters’ relationship in Moonlighting. Does anyone else get that vibe?
@83/Paladin: It would be more accurate to say that Moonlighting and Lois and Clark were both homages to the screwball comedies of the 1940s, particularly Howard Hawks’s newsroom-based His Girl Friday in the latter case. A quick search tells me a lot of observers and critics have likened Lois Lane (in L&C and elsewhere) to Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson in that film.
@81 Exactly! That moment and a couple of conversations she has with Lois (“You can at least admit you were a little scared”) indicate that there is more to her than fluff, and I so much wanted to see that developed! But, instead, they dropped the character.
Season 3 has some good episodes but starts going downhill. Season 4 is the season they were forced to make to fill their network contract & it always seems like a show being made by people who didn’t want to be there any more.
@84/CLB: Agreed to all.
Looking back at this three years later, I can’t believe that you guys got through 86 comments on the show without anybody mentioning “How galactically stupid was she?” :-)
@87
https://youtu.be/A9mJADDqfuo
@88 Okay, so I conflated two separate parts of Tempus’ great monolog (sneer-olog?)… it has been about a quarter of a century since I saw it. Still one of the great moments in live-action superhero media though.
Wm. Starr: To be fair to the commenters (and myself), this article was about the pilot movie, not the series as a whole.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The article was, but the discussion seemed to have expanded to cover the whole series, especially the long, slow slog to the characters finally getting married. So I really was a little bit surprised that no one had brought up that bit of dialog that I’d thought was a classic, right up there with that scene you loved in Green Lantern where the mask on his face did nothing to keep his girlfriend from knowing it was him. (And then of course, I got it wrong, sigh.)
I didn’t like that Tempus monologue that much, because Tempus never really worked for me as an archvillain. I never found the actor that impressive, and Tempus is kind of a lame name for a time traveler. (I’m trying to remember if there’s a time-traveling DC Comics villain they could’ve used, but the only ones I can think of are Flash villains.)
I think that was the episode that really annoyed me when Terry Kiser’s H.G. Wells quoted Shakespeare’s “in apprehension how like a god,” and the scriptwriters misunderstood “apprehension” in the modern sense of anxiety rather than the Bard’s intended sense of comprehension, understanding. That is not a mistake the real H.G. Wells would have made, and it drove me crazy.
Although I’ll grant that Tempus’s opinion that Lois should’ve been able to see through the disguise is far more applicable to Dean Cain’s Clark and Superman, who always obviously had the same face, voice and speech cadence, than for, say, Christopher Reeve’s Clark and Superman.