The below review of Season 1 of Superman & Lois discusses some important plot points, but no spoilers. Season 1 is now streaming on CWTV.com and The CW's app.
Superman & Lois spins out of Supergirl and The CW’s other DC shows, but it sheds their villain-of-the-week structure and looks and feels several worlds apart. Its first season finale, which aired on Tuesday, ends an initial 15-episode run that skillfully blends gooey optimism, soapy character drama, enjoyable (if serviceable) action, and surprisingly nuanced updates to Smallville, Clark Kent’s Midwestern hometown. If the pop culture landscape weren’t already saturated with cape stories, it would likely have been a definitive cultural revival for Superman, on par with the films by Richard Donner starring Christopher Reeve. However, the show also has a distinctly Grant Morrison — the writer of All Star Superman — bent in that it reconciles a number of different, seemingly contradictory approaches to the mythos, and carves its own identity in the process.
The show technically picks up after The CW’s Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover, in which a multiversal threat was thwarted and, in true DC Comics fashion, several major continuity changes were made. One such change left Clark Kent (Tyler Hoechlin) and Lois Lane (Elizabeth Tulloch) with a pair of sons they didn’t previously have — which is sort of the impetus for Superman & Lois, only the show doesn’t treat the twins as a cosmic surprise (its connections to the “Arrowverse” are nominal at best). In its opening scenes, the show re-tells the story of Clark and Lois’ romance, and their domestic lives with their now teenage sons, Jonathan (Jordan Elsass) and Jordan (Alex Garfin), whose existence isn’t anything out of the ordinary — that is, not yet. They live, and have always lived, straightforward lives in Metropolis, and while the show does eventually have a multiverse subplot, it doesn’t threaten to erase this narrative status quo, in which Superman faces his biggest challenge to date: fatherhood.
When the Daily Planet is bought out by a ruthless conglomerate and turned into an unethical husk, both Lois and Clark find themselves without steady employment. Their best bet to stay afloat is to move back to Smallville, a place which holds many happy memories for Clark, though one which has been radically transformed by economic downturn. The idealism of Clark’s past exists as nostalgia for the viewer; he speaks of his childhood home as if it were the Smallville of Donner’s Superman: The Movie (1978), which was itself conceived as a nostalgic throwback to a Norman Rockwell-esque, 1950s white-picket-fence heartland. However, this land of plenty has been replaced by a town where both jobs and neighborly trust are hard to come by. The show’s realistic modern update forms the backdrop for Jonathan and Jordan, whose lives are upended not only by the big move, but by learning that their father is secretly the Man of Steel, and that he’s being hunted by a mysterious villain (Wolé Parks) with a nearly invincible exosuit (learning this character’s identity will be a delight for comic readers).
The show examines Superman’s iconography in several ways, and the twins’ story is where this approach truly shines. Clark Kent, the simple, decent Kansas farm boy, has always had two front-facing personas that, depending on the version of the character, are either acts he puts on, or elements of his personality he plays up for other people. There’s Superman, the square-jawed boy scout with his chest puffed out, and then there’s Clark Kent, the mild-mannered, anxious reporter who hunches and blends in. The series splits these elements of his character through a prism to create Jonathan and Jordan. Jonathan is a hyper-capable high school athlete — a veritable boy of steel. Jordan, on the other hand, is more withdrawn. He hides beneath a mess of curly hair, and his anxiety disorder keeps him at arm’s length from other people. Clark, in theory, ought to be able to raise two boys who feel like projections of himself, but he connects much more easily with Jonathan, a fellow football player, and his superhero antics leave him with little time to deal with Jordan’s daily struggles.
This dynamic, too, soon flips on its head when Jordan — and not the more Superman-like Jonathan — begins manifesting Kryptonian abilities, including ones that need intense training and oversight from Clark, like heat-vision and ultra-sensitive hearing. Before long, Clark’s priorities shift to his superpowered son, and Jonathan is left out in the cold instead. The show may have nostalgia for Superman, but it also knows the dramatic potential of having him be a less-than-perfect dad; in some ways, it makes the character more human than he’s ever felt on screen.
At first, the show struggles to make the “Lois” half of its title feel as important. Tulloch is tenacious as the world-famous reporter, though she initially serves to propel the overall plot, as she uncovers the nefarious plans behind a new Smallville development project, headed by suave billionaire CEO Morgan Edge (Adam Rayner), whose promise of widespread employment seems too good to be true. She manages to connect Edge’s company to a number of disappearances, and a couple of re-appearances too, as people begin turning back up with unstable Kryptonian powers. Eventually, though, the series goes on to give Tulloch a whole lot more dramatic meat, both when it digs into her maternal anxieties, and when it places her in an ethical dilemma between her responsibilities to the public and to her family — including her father, General Sam Lane (Dylan Walsh), who finds himself trapped in a similar conundrum.
The question of how to deal with (and prepare for) a world with superpowered beings goes far beyond logistics, and becomes a battle between deeply held personal convictions. Wolé Parks’ armoured villain is an especially vital piece of this puzzle, not only because he starts out at odds with both Superman and Morgan Edge, but because his story is rooted in meaningful, complicated human drama and altruistic instincts, the layers of which the show carefully peels back, one episode at a time.
The supporting cast is great in general, especially the Kents’ new neighbors, the Cushing family. Clark’s former flame, Lana Cushing, née Lang (Emmanuelle Chriqui) is a sincere mother of two, and a reminder of all the small-town good that first molded Clark. Her firefighter husband, Kyle Cushing (Erik Valdez), supports Edge’s Smallville initiatives for all the good they could do, which leads to a clash between himself and Lois, who he sees as a hoity-toity outsider to the town (Valdez is arguably the show’s highlight, playing a strong-willed but occasionally belligerent and misguided man whose good intentions are hampered by ego and booze). The Cushings’ older daughter, Sarah (Inde Navarrette), is the twins’ guide to Smallville, and a girl with mental health issues of her own — a subject the show broaches with care. She and Jordan find kinship in each other’s struggles and become romantically involved, and it feels refreshing to watch a CW show where the fictional teenage romance bears all the awkward, naive hallmarks of a real one, and the people involved look and behave like actual teenagers.
The Cushings have a younger daughter too, though the show hilariously finds reasons and contrivances to write her out of scenes. It plays like a running joke after a while, though one that feels right at home in a series where Tyler Hoechlin’s doe-eyed sincerity goes hand-in-hand with his goofy muscle-suit. This combination of silly and sincere bursts to life during flashback scenes which re-tell Superman’s origins. One in particular sees Hoechlin re-enacting the cover of Action Comics #1, Superman’s very first appearance, while dressed in the character’s long-outdated (though in this case, indisputably charming) costume from 1938. A kid compliments the suit, to which Hoechlin replies, “Thanks, my mom made it!” with a completely straight face. It’s hard not to fall in love with his version of the character, both when he’s in the cape — this Superman is a polite polyglot who speaks every human language and protects vulnerable immigrants from white supremacists — and when he navigates the challenges of raising two teenagers in an unpredictable new dynamic, in which he might occasionally be the villain. On the surface, Jonathan and Jordan might seem like “jock” and “nerd” cutouts, but they go much deeper than that, with parental and social insecurities that inform their decisions (including their most misguided ones), and with a genuine love for one another, even in difficult moments.
The show has a remarkable visual approach. Its 2.2:1 widescreen aspect ratio makes it much more movie-like than its CW counterparts (modern television is largely 1.78:1 — or 16:9, the shape of an HD TV), and while its lighting is often just as flat as those other shows, its Dust Bowl colour palette helps disguise its shortcomings, while also evoking the Kansas of the Great Depression. While the digital colour wash used for this effect is distinctly modern, the cinematography also employs Anamorphic lenses from the 1960s — the Panavision B-series — which gives the town and its characters a classic cinematic feel, turning shots of people reflecting at sunset into gorgeous landscape portraits. These dueling old-and-new aesthetics are the perfect way to tell a story about Superman returning to his past in order to protect his future.
The show’s action echoes the supersonic whiz-bang of modern films like Man of Steel (2013), but it never loses sight of its old-world optimism, which it captures as stray light peeking into darkened spaces during quieter scenes. There’s also no dearth of superhero silliness in the framing; the show might look more “prestigious” than something like The Flash, but it’s entirely self aware of the comic book visual language on which it’s based. For instance, when Superman comes up against a hivemind of beings with Kryptonian powers, this horde is framed like a horizontal splash page, with closeups of their faces and flying torsos in close proximity, bunched together like a single consciousness with glowing red eyes. The show is never less than good, and when its story and aesthetics fully coalesce, it’s often pretty great.
Superman, as an individual, has been an icon for decades, but his story has always been rooted in family, from the parents who saved him from a dying planet, to the parents who raised him on Earth. Now, Superman & Lois expands on that mythology, not only by giving the character a family of his own, but by weaving together a compelling story where family, in one form or another, is the driving force behind every character — hero and villain alike.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/3iY4RkV
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