Well, I missed a few weeks because of various movings and unpackings, so I can’t rightly call this “Week 4.” But it is post 4! And I’m having just as much fun writing about the things I love as when I started this.
Unfortunately, one of the things I love is Smallville. Enjoy some thoughts on some of the CW’s finest work (fondly derogatory).
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Smallville, which ran for ten seasons on the WB/CW between 2001 and 2011, is objectively a terrible show in almost every way imaginable. It’s my favorite ever and I’ve watched most of it like, at least four times.
Never heard of Smallville? Honestly, good for you. It premiered in 2001 to surprisingly great acclaim. All ten seasons follow the teenage and early adulthood adventures of Clark Kent and his cast of friends and foes in Smallville, Kansas.
Never heard of Clark Kent? Wow. Really?
This is Superman before he’s Superman—before the costume and even before the ability to fly. This is Clark struggling with his powers. This is Clark struggling with his sense of wrong and right. This is Clark dealing with the usual CW drama, such as: will the woman he loves really marry his arch-nemesis? Will his dad let him play high school football? How will he defeat the confounding monster-of-the-week?
I love Smallville with my whole, stupid heart. I first watched it over a decade ago, while it was still airing its final season, and I was consumed by its drama, its love of quips, its worshipping of Lois Lane. How it honors the spirit of Superman while somehow deviating completely from what I believe Superman—and Clark, for that matter—to be.
I haven’t rewatched this show in quite some time—maybe around six years?—but I started it over from Season 4 (with the introduction of Lois Lane, duh) about a month before I really began packing up my Indiana apartment in order to move back into my childhood bedroom—which I have now done, as of two weeks ago. I was taking my rewatch slow at first, really savoring the nostalgia, but once I got home, I started background-bingeing Smallville as I unpacked and set up my room.
Now I’ve just started Season 8, following all these terrible superheroic misadventures as I organize the many hundreds of comic books I’ve somehow collected and abandoned in my parents’ home.
I’ve been slowly working on this Smallville post—if not drafting, then often thinking about it—for almost three weeks now, and still I can’t really tell you what keeps me coming back to Smallville. The early seasons in particular are an egregious look into made-for-teens television from the early ‘00s: regressive takes on everything from (hetero)sexuality to morality to mental health.
Smallville is truly a product of its time, which is post-9/11 America.
Makes sense, right? That a Superman television show set in the American heartland—Clark lives on a working Kansas farm with his adoptive parents—achieved meteoric success amidst waves and waves of intense patriotism? And intense fear?
My big thesis—and there’s probably literature to back me up if I ever bothered to do a cursory JSTOR search—is that the huge tentpole superhero movies are so dominant in our culture today because of when they started to be made in earnest: in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Though Iron Man wouldn’t debut until 2008, it’s a movie quite literally about the aftermath of terrorism and warmongering. What one man will do to protect himself and his country from some vague, villainous, ambiguously Arab threat. And now we have the MCU crushing culture as we know it under its massive boot heel.
(Batgirl is my Snyder Cut, by the way. I can’t look away from the HBOMax disaster.)
So, yeah. It’s fucked up. The fucked-up-ness of it all is a different sort of essay, but I doubt superheroes would be their current level of mainstream without 9/11, and even without Smallville’s happenstance airing during those early post-9/11 years.
Despite all that: I still love Smallville. I love the monsters of the week, which almost always result in some screwed up “fix the crazy person in an insane asylum” plot. I love the weird sexualized shots of women’s silhouettes in the shower (there are many of them, usually between Seasons 4-6). I LOVE the homoerotic tension between Clark Kent and Lex Luthor, which is more obvious upon every rewatch.
I love Lois Lane, full stop.
I love how Jensen Ackles has a lead role in Season 4, and then his whole plot—which, seriously, was the entire plot of Season 4—is never mentioned again once he ditches Smallville for Supernatural.
Season 4 is hilarious. Weirdest TV I’ve ever watched. I love it. I would never recommend it to anyone.
And that’s how I feel about Smallville twelve or so years after I first sat down and watched it all. It is, without a doubt in my mind, a terrible show that I could not in good faith ask anyone else to watch (though I often try anyway). But it imprinted on me at an incredibly impressionable age, and now all ten seasons are an indelible part of my psyche.
It’s an escape, a fantasy—just why it took off in 2001, and just why I fell so deeply in love with it in high school.
I recently got to rewatching the Season 6 episode “Noir,” in which Jimmy Olsen conks his head and dreams that he and his friends—Clark Kent among them—are stuck in a black-and-white noir version of their world. I can’t watch this episode (which is pretty good, comparatively, mostly because it deviates from the usual Smallville formula) without thinking about the first time I saw it: 2am, deeply anxious, a 10th grade school night, unable to sleep. I crawled downstairs to my living room, opened up my laptop, and watched “Noir” until whatever was bothering me faded to the background.
Sometimes, that’s what TV needs to be: a convoluted, drama-filled, sociopolitically-fraught escape from our convoluted, drama-filled, sociopolitically-fraught lives. Smallville is not a good show. The acting is piss-poor, it’s sexist, it’s racist, it’s usually poorly written, it hates mentally-ill people, and it celebrates a version of American morality that I find not only outdated, but just a little reprehensible.
But, god, when Lois and Clark banter? I can’t look away.
I’m almost done with this 2022 Smallville rewatch. The older I get—and the older it gets—the worse this show is.
I will never stop watching Smallville.