Alfred Gough and Miles Millar’s Superman-without-the-suit is warm, handsome and better acted than it needed to be, chiefly by Michael Rosenbaum and John Glover as the Luthors. It is also 216 episodes long, and about a third of them are the same episode.
The idea is a good one and it is stated in the first hour. Take Superman, remove the cape, the flying and Metropolis, and leave a teenager on a Kansas farm who can outrun a truck and does not know why. Alfred Gough and Miles Millar built Smallville on that, and for its first two or three seasons it is a proper, sturdy piece of Tuesday-night television. It then ran for ten years, and our verdict is the one you would expect: the good years are worth your time, and the rest are for people who have already decided to stay.
The town is the best thing in it. Attila Szalay and Glen Winter light the Kent farm in late-afternoon gold, all yellow fields and red barn boards, and the Luthor mansion in cold blues and greys, so that you always know which family you are in before anyone speaks. Lance King’s production design gives Clark a loft in the barn, which tells you most of what you need to know about him, and gives Lex a mansion with far more rooms than people, which tells you the rest. Mark Snow’s score is soft strings and piano under the farm and a low electronic pulse under the mansion, and it is doing more work than the dialogue in a good many scenes.
Michael Rosenbaum is the reason to watch. His Lex is clever, lonely, quick to be kind and quicker to be hurt, a young man who wants very badly to be good and keeps finding it is not in him. Rosenbaum plays every scene with Clark as a friendship he half knows will end, and we found ourselves rooting for him, for years, against every piece of comic-book history we knew by heart, and feeling faintly foolish about it. John Glover, as Lionel, is the programme’s other adult pleasure: silk-voiced, amused, and cruel in the tone other men use to order lunch. When the two of them share a scene the show stops being a teen drama and becomes something closer to a chamber play about a father who would rather ruin his son than lose him.
Tom Welling is decent and steadily gets better. He has the frame for the part and an honest, worried face, and he is at his best in the scenes where Clark is simply a son, with Annette O’Toole’s Martha giving the farm its warmth and its spine. He is less well served by Kristin Kreuk’s Lana, or rather by the writers’ handling of her; for season after season the two of them stand in the barn and fail to say the one thing that would end the plot, and the show mistakes this for tension. It is not tension. It is a delay, and by the fourth year we had stopped caring whether it was ever resolved.
The structure does not help. Most weeks a classmate or a drifter is touched by the meteor rock, gains a power, misuses it, and is dealt with by the end of the hour, and after the first season this formula is visibly holding the programme up rather than the other way round. There is a stretch in the middle years, involving witchcraft and Jensen Ackles as a games coach with a secret, during which we were bored, and then irritated at being bored by a show we had liked.
It recovers. Erica Durance arrives as Lois Lane and is a jolt of energy, brash and funny and unimpressed by everyone, and Justin Hartley’s Oliver Queen gives Clark a rival who has already made the choices Clark keeps putting off. Cassidy Freeman’s Tess Mercer and Callum Blue’s Zod give the last seasons a harder edge. Laura Vandervoort’s Kara, when she comes, is the only person in Kansas who can fly, and the show gets some sly comedy out of Clark’s envy. Allison Mack, throughout, is the programme’s most reliable performer: Chloe is the friend who knows, and Mack plays the cost of knowing without ever asking for credit.
Against the 1978 film and against what came after, Smallville sits somewhere in the middle: more patient than most of what has followed, more sentimental than Richard Donner, and with a villain who is, for a long while, the best written person on screen. Each episode runs 43 minutes and carries a 12. Watch the first three seasons, skip forward when the barn scenes start repeating, and stay for anything with a Luthor in it.
