When The CW debuted Arrow in the fall of 2012, the series represented a major pivot point for the network’s relationship with its DC TV offerings. The series, developed by Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim, and Andrew Kreisberg, was a bold new direction away from the campy teen drama of Smallville, which started out as a show with more in common with Dawson’s Creek than any superhero movie you may love and evolved to embrace more of its candy-colored comic book roots while never allowing Tom Welling’s Clark Kent to actually suit up or fly.
Arrow was going to be darker, grittier, more concerned with the morality of vigilantism while fighting back organized crime and evil corporate businessmen. Its lead’s catchphrase (“…you have failed this city”) presented the hero as judge, jury, and sometimes executioner, and the creative team seemed to try to evoke Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight films while also cribbing a TV structure from recently retired hit genre series Lost. Eventually, however, Arrow and the many spin-offs it directly or indirectly spawned eschewed the morally murky vigilantism narrative for more brightly colored and sci-fi-based action-adventure stories of the DC Comics universe. A formula began to congeal.
A machine began churning, and, while each subsequent Arrowverse show was giving a slightly different identity, setting, and tone, all of the series had a common set of elements. Each hero has a group of trusted friends, featuring a tech guru who runs magical algorithms while delivering quippy one-liners; some sort of scientist who also doubles as a doctor as needed; a stoic, middle-aged mentor; and at least one family member or love interest. That group may or may not start out without superpowers, but most of them will eventually enter the field of battle, likely with powers, eventually. The hero and their team will have some sort of impenetrable base that will nevertheless be broken into a handful of times a season, and they will battle weekly threats while unwinding a larger mystery.
Of course, some shows, like The Flash and Supergirl, conform more tightly to this formula than others, like Black Lightning, but all the shows are clearly made from the same DNA, with a similar look and feel…that is until now. Superman & Lois is the first Arrowverse series that truly looks like it is trying to break new ground and pivot into a bold new direction for the mega-franchise. Many of the departures that Berlanti and crew authorized for Black Lightning (a more specific sense of place, more domestic drama, more adult themes) are amplified in this new series from Todd Helbing (Spartacus). The series may be a spin-off of Supergirl, following the characters of Clark (Tyler Hoechlin, Teen Wolf) and Lois (Elizabeth Tulloch, Grimm) after the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths, where the two teamed up with various other Arrowverse heroes to save the multiverse only to find it rebooted resulting in their infant son turning into teenage twin boys, but everything you need to know about the series can be found in the pilot.
The story opens up with Clark giving us a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it direct address to the audience detailing his superhero origins, his life growing up in Smallville, and his current status quo as a loving father of two boys, Jonathan (Jordan Elsass, Little Fires Everywhere), who is a bit of a golden child in his popularity, humor, and athleticism, and Jordan (Alex Garfin, The Peanuts Movie), a more troubled, quiet, sensitive soul with a diagnosed anxiety disorder. It may not be the perfect life that he and Lois always pictured for themselves, but it appears to be a happy one. This opening immediately orients the audience to just what version of Superman Superman & Lois will be exploring. He’s an adult, with a family and responsibilities and a past he is nostalgic for but which feels quite distant from his reality. He’s happy, but it’s complicated, due to the difficulties of lying to his sons about his secret identity and the additional strain that it already places on what must be the most intense work-life balance problem one could imagine. Lois knows exactly who and what he is, and she supports him through it while carving out a life for herself as the world’s most famous and successful investigative journalist.
Over the course of the next hour and a half, Superman & Lois sets itself apart from the rest of the Arrowverse in both its visual aesthetic and its tone. While the Arrowverse is typically jumping back and forth between a bright and sunny visual palette and an over-dark nighttime look all on a clear TV budget, Superman & Lois has a truly cinematic look and feel, with a widescreen aspect ratio and cinematography that actually feels thoughtfully deploy to inform the tone and take advantage of the beautiful natural imagery on display throughout once the story shifts to Smallville. The series also has far slower and more deliberate pacing. Arrowverse shows, much like a great deal of contemporary TV genre shows, are so full of plot and characters every episode that most of the time the audience is being whisked from here to there with a tremendous pace, only slowing down for the occasional climactic monologue. Superman & Lois actually plays dramatic scenes straight and gives these moments room to breathe, allowing the emotions to land more impactfully.
The narrative engine for this series feels different as well. While there may be a mysterious villain or two looming over the events of the pilot, the vast majority of the episode is devoted to the domestic drama inside the Kent household. Clark, whose adoptive father died when he was a teen, loses his mother unexpectedly towards the start of the episode, removing the Kents from the hustle and bustle of their life in Metropolis and forcing Clark to take a good long look at what his home town has become. Smallville is, like many small towns in America these days, fading away, its population economically and emotionally depressed. It needs a hero, but one of flesh and blood and not steel. The more we learn of the family, the more we understand their plight and how it’s not all that dissimilar from many families, where parents are overworked and where children struggle to find their own identity amidst real-world issues like mental health conditions.
And yet, there is a really hopeful, earnest optimism to Hoechlin’s Superman and Tulloch’s Lois. These two are, in many ways, struggling, but they do have each other and their sons have them, even if they don’t always feel like they do. Of the two boys, Garfin’s Jordan has the meatier material, squaring off with his dad over his well-intended deceit and connecting with Sarah Cushing (Inde Navarrette, 13 Reasons Why), his dad’s first love’s daughter, over their shared struggles with mental illness, and he meets that challenge commendably. And while this may change as the series evolves, it is very exciting to see a series take the family drama angle of a superhero’s life seriously, instead of just using their family as “their greatest weakness” for villains to exploit. Clark’s home life may be a source of stress and tension, but it is also clear that it is a source of validation, love, and purpose.
It is unclear if Superman & Lois can maintain this level of cinematic production values, dramatic pacing, and idiosyncratic vision over the course of a full season. However, taken as a mission statement for the next era of DC content on The CW, it is hard not to be excited and intrigued. If you are looking for a more typical serialized series with weekly baddies and superheroics taking center stage, this is probably not the show for you. However, that show already exists on this network across nearly a half dozen different iterations. If you are looking for something a bit different, a bit more mature, and a bit more grounded in realism and family, please check this out. You may just be pleasantly surprised.
