On October 16, 2001, the formula of Superhero-based television would change forever. On this night, on a channel known at the time as The WB, Smallville would premiere, reintroducing people of all ages to Clark Kent. This show—an origin story to the Man of Steel—would last ten seasons and garner millions of fans. In those ten seasons, it would also shift the narrative around superheroes on television.
At the time, Superheroes were starting to break free from their Saturday morning cartoon reputation. The first X-Men movie came out a year before, and the first of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films would come out the following year. Other than that, the general public mostly saw superheroes outside panels of comics as nothing more than cartoonish children’s entertainment or—thanks to the success and eventual failure of the Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher Batman films—campy live-action trainwrecks. From the get-go, Smallville also separated itself from each one of these, opting to focus solely on Clark Kent’s life, from Adolescence up until he donned his iconic costume. The show’s “No tights, no flights” rule stayed in effect for the duration of the series, not allowing Clark to wear the costume or fly in the show. Doing this allowed the show to keep developing Clark’s character, as the creators felt that once he put on the suit and took flight, Smallville would no longer be a “Clark Kent” show. Despite this, they allowed Clark to discover his other abilities and fight antagonists throughout the show, treating them as new developments in his character and making story arcs about learning to control them or their impact on his life.
The writers also took plenty of liberties with the source material, opting to do things like introducing Lex Luthor in the first season, allowing us to see a budding friendship sour, eventually becoming the feud that we knew it would—or introducing Lois Lane in the fourth season, setting up the eventual love interest of Clark as nothing more than a new character that seems put off by him and the small Kansas town that he lives in. The interpretations that were made breathed new life into these characters, giving the writers the room to make artistic choices in how relationships would form. In an era that had mostly been crowded by television and movies that were made to sell toys to kids, Smallville tried to tell a compelling story that would build up a character that later in his life would be viewed as an American icon.
Smallville’s approach didn’t just stop at its way of looking at characters. The way that it tried to appeal to a mass group of people helped open it up to a massive audience that would only grow as time passed. Instead of just being a stupid children’s show that studio executives didn’t allow to have any depth or an overly dramatic bore that would try too hard to appeal to older audiences, it made itself more of a coming-of-age dramedy that appealed to audiences young and old. The preteens and teens watching would be able to see a show where one of the most powerful beings in all of media would go through the same struggles that they were, while adults would be able to watch a complex show with their families.
Nowadays, live-action superheroes on television are practically everywhere. With all of the CW superhero shows that have come and gone in the last decade, and the many MCU shows and DC shows that pop up on streaming platforms, you’re likely not going to go a day without hearing some kind of talk about the genre that now floods our televisions. But back in 2001, the idea of putting a hero on tv was seen as an awful investment. When Alfred Gough and Miles Millar decided to look past the reputation of this genre, they would change the course of superhero media forever.