"I'd give anything to be normal." - Tom Welling as Clark Kent
Smallville: The Complete First Season DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
In 1933, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster created the first Superman comic. The world greeted it with a yawn - quite an inauspicious start for what would become the most enduring comic book character of all time. Over the next seventy years, their hero would go on to conquer not only comic books but radio, film, and television as well.
The latest Superman incarnation is Smallville, the WB's canny reworking of Superman's mythology for the Dawson's Creek crowd. Predictably, the WB's usual blend of an excruciatingly attractive cast, high production values, and soapy intrigue is here, but the series is surprisingly effective at re-imagining Superman's history and origins.
The series' pilot flashes back to October 1989, a seemingly peaceful fall day in Smallville, Kansas, "Creamed Corn Capital of the World." The calm is shattered by a freak meteor storm that showers the town with chunks of glowing green rock, destroying homes and business and killing several residents in the process. In a cornfield outside of town, Jonathan and Martha Kent (John Schneider and Annette O'Toole) witness the destruction, and discover a young boy who fell to earth in a spaceship during the meteor shower.
Twelve years later, the young boy has grown up to be Clark Kent (Tom Welling), a high school freshman. The Kents have kept his origins a secret all of these years, forcing him into a sheltered existence for his own safety and for the safety of others. Throughout his life, Clark has developed powers and abilities he scarcely understands - he can run at lightning speed, and things that would hurt normal kids do not affect him at all. Most adolescents simply have to deal with facial hair and changing voices. Clark, on the other hand, develops the ability to see through things.
Clark may be developing super powers, but he is still a social klutz, especially around Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk). Lana, whose parents were killed in the meteor shower, lives down the road from Clark with her Aunt Nell. Clark is weak-kneed with love every time he sees her (partially because of the Kryptonite necklace she wears), but she only has eyes for jock Whitney (Eric Johnson). Clark is also oblivious to the fact that his friend Chloe (Allison Mack) is in love with him, even though it is obvious to pal Pete (Sam Jones III).
When rich playboy Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) loses control of his car at sixty miles per hour, slams into Clark, and sends them both plummeting into a river, Clark uses his powers to save the unconscious Lex. Lex befriends his savior, but is suspicious about how Clark could have survived, so he begins a covert investigation.
For his part, the accident cements Clark's understanding of his indestructibility, but also increases his feelings of alienation. Upon looking at Chloe's "Wall of Weird" - the school newspaper editor's collection of strange events that have taken place in Smallville since the meteor shower - Clark realizes that he is inadvertently responsible for many of the town's problems and sorrows, and decides to correct these wrongs.
The world of Smallville is beautifully realized in this lushly filmed series. With its rustic farmlands, quaint main street, and bright colors, it perfectly captures the look and feel of its pastoral setting. It is a living postcard, a Country Time Lemonade commercial with plot, a vivid slice of Americana - albeit one filmed in Canada.
The show makes fine use of the original tales of Superman, throwing in enough inside jokes to please hardcore Superman fans who might have otherwise been upset by all the tinkering that has been done with his backstory. This revised history is one of the show's strongest points. It is fun to sit back and try to figure out how the characters in their current situation will evolve into the story that we all know and love. The creators often drop clever allusions and hints. Clark may not be running around in a cape and tights, but he is usually seen in Superman's familiar colors of blue and red.
The characters are also unusually strong. It is easy to be sucked into the Chloe-Clark-Lana-Whitney roundelay, wondering how their relationships will develop. Logically these soap opera-esque machinations should be the show's weak point, but that falls to an unlikely aspect of the series - its action. It's almost unimaginable, but the series most often stumbles when dealing with those elements that make Superman super.
This can mostly be blamed on the show's heavy reliance on "freak of the week" storylines. Almost every week, some hapless teen stumbles onto Kryptonite, develops some sort of adverse reaction, and then goes on a rampage. This soon becomes predictable and dull, causing the "action" to seem like intrusions on the stories involving the lives of the main characters. Some of the episodes practically feel like leftover scripts from the old Friday the 13th TV series. This is especially true of the show's early episodes. Later installments like "Drone" fare a little better because the writers seem to have more of a handle on how to reconcile the show's two halves with each other.
Even in strong "freak of the week" episodes, however, there remains one major flaw in the show's logic. Smallville has a relatively small population of 45,001, but no one in town seems to find it suspicious that two or three teens and other townspeople die each week under strange circumstances. Sure, Chloe keeps track of things on her "Wall of Weird," but even she doesn't seem to acknowledge the extent of Smallville's decreasing population. Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but asking us to believe that the characters we have come to like are this dumb is simply too much.
Still, the show always manages to be entertaining. Tellingly, the series' strongest episodes, such as "Rogue" (where a bad cop blackmails Clark into helping him break the law), "Stray" (when the Kents shelter an abused boy from his murderous stepfather), "Obscura" (a kidnapper targets Chloe), and "Tempest" (the slam bang season ending cliffhanger) center on human characters, with Kryptonite taking a backseat.
Part of the show's appeal lies in its fresh scrubbed cast. Most of them are too good-looking to be human. That would be enough to hook most audience members, but as an added bonus, they are all also good actors. Kreuk infuses Lana with a decency and earthiness that allows us to think that maybe Clark doesn't just love her for her twinkly, almond-shaped eyes. Welling is not given much to do - Clark can be a bit too earnest - but every now and then he is allowed to lighten up. Mack brings Chloe a sympathy inducing blend of smarts and hidden pain. Rosenbaum is riveting as the amiably evil Lex, playing the character like a lazily coiled snake - one that could well be asleep or planning to strike.
O'Toole and Schneider help to ground the show as Martha and Jonathan. We should all be so lucky to age as gracefully as former Dukes of Hazzard star Schneider. His cool, quiet masculinity combined with O'Toole's warm compassion give the show a strong moral center, clearly informing Clark's decisions and actions.
This points out that Smallville is essentially a show about the importance of parents and parental roles. The Kent family is as well-adjusted as those in '50s sitcoms like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver. Good girl Lana is an orphan, but we are told that her aunt loves her even more than she would have loved her own child. In this equation, good parenting equals good kids. Of course, the opposite also holds true. Lex, torn between good and evil, yet more strongly pulled by evil, is saddled with a cruel, calculating father (Lionel Luthor, played with maximum smarm by John Glover) who views his son more as a pawn than a loved one. This even carries over into the freaks Clark encounters - most of those poor, Kryptonite infected teens have bullying, overly demanding parents (as in "Drone" and "Leech"), come from broken homes, or seemingly have no parental supervision at all.
The twenty-one episodes that make up the first season are divided onto six discs. Viewers can choose to play all of a disc's episodes, or can choose to watch individual episodes. The episodes are divided into six chapter stops.
