Just got through with the first season of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.
You know what? I had forgotten how much I enjoyed the first season of this show. I guess the third and fourth season (or at least what I saw of the fourth season) left such a bad taste in my mouth that it’s hard to remember that when this program was first on the air nearly fifteen years ago I was a huge fan of it.
I mean it was Superman on television. How could I not be into it?
Well, at least at first.
The thing that bugs me is that I was listening to the commentary to the pilot episode (because I am that kind of guy) and watching the featurette where the show’s developers and directors and actors talk about how the series came to be the people involved, especially Deborah Joy LeVine (the woman who developed the series for television) they all talk as if they were the first ones to come up with this take on Superman. LeVine makes it seem as if the Kents being alive, Clark being the real guy and Superman being the costume and the romance of Lois and Clark were all her idea.
This irks me because most of what people seemed to like from the show all came from the comics, specifically the revamp that John Byrne did in Man of Steel and what Marv Wolfman, Jerry Ordway, Roger Stern, Louise Simonson, Dan Jurgens and the rest had done in developing the Superman books into a good mix of super-hero action and soap opera.
I don’t know why this bugs me, but it does.
Of course the argument could be made that LeVine didn’t do a whole lot of research into the comics before developing the series, but the fact that there is a character named Cat Grant in the first season pretty much shoots that theory to hell.
LeVine bugged me in other ways too. I could go into how much I hate when producers and directors and writers say things like, “You know, I didn’t want to do a Superman (or any other comic book character) series, but I would like to do a series with the same characters but in a different way,” but that’s a post for another time.
More to follow…