I’ve had strong opinions about Smallville ever since its 2001 debut. My hope was
to share the long and the short of it all back in May on the occasion of the series’ finale — but I only managed the short.
Here’s the long.
What follows is chock-full of spoilers on the show’s ten seasons, as of last month available in their entirety on DVD. If you haven’t (a) seen this divisive, enduringly popular yet much reviled take on the the Superman mythos begun in 1938 by creators Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster, or (2) at least cared enough to keep tabs it through articles or conversations, then you’re awfully polite to keep reading.
The series finale of Smallville repeats on CW stations tonight at 8 p.m. ET/PT. I watched it last Friday with hope, skepticism, and ultimately the same disappointment familiar to me from throughout the show’s 10-year run.
My in-depth reflections on this controversial adaptation of the Superman saga have proven difficult to wrangle, and if they’re not published soon they’ll have to hang out on the burgeoning scrapheap of abandoned posts. I certainly hope to get a piece online by November, when Smallville: The Complete Series is released by Warner in a 62-disc collectible package with all 218 episodes and special features not available on the season-by-season boxed sets. I just wish the subject was worth the effort. [Update: Here you go.]
Related: El on Earth • Box Set Full of Kryptonite • Failure to Launch
A few weeks gone by, Nikki Stafford declared June to be Vampire Month on her blog, Nik at Nite. The primary topic of conversation — a TV show which I’m observing a moratorium on speaking about — had begun to eat itself, and Nikki had fangdom on the brain for at least two good reasons: (1) ECW Press, where she’s an editor and which publishes her Finding [censored] books, has a True Blood companion coming out. (2) She was preparing to attend Slayage — an academic conference devoted to the work of Joss Whedon in general and Buffy the Vampire Slayer in particular. I think there was also something to do with The Vampire Diaries in there.
I was surprisingly late getting into the adventures of Buffy Summers.
What’s your favorite current TV show? I don’t mean the one you think is the best, necessarily, but the one you can just let go and enjoy most, whether that feeling comes from pulse-pounding action, total investment in the characters, or laugh-out-loud comedy — or all three.
Mine’s Supernatural.
