Yeah, I know I am a bit late on this one. The show aired its season finale a month ago, and I only got caught up just now. In my defense, many times if I don’t catch any sort of network show when it airs, I don’t always have time to catch up again later. Likewise, it doesn’t help that my local CW affiliate often pre-empts programming for Yankees night games, and I’ve never been one for sports. Point is, I am probably lucky I got this one done at all.
But you know what? It was worth it.
The latest show in the CW’s common “Arrowverse” heroic universe, named for the show that kicked the whole thing off even if it is off the air right now, Superman & Lois follows the basic idea that Clark Kent/Superman (Tyler Hoechlin) and Lois Lane (Elizabeth “Bitsie” Tulloch) decide, after the passing of Clark’s adoptive mother Martha to move themselves and their twin teenage sons to the old Kent farm rather than sell it. Lois resigned from her position at the Daily Planet after it was bought out by evil billionaire type Morgan Edge (Adam Rayner), and Clark thinks the farm living might be good for the whole family. As for the boys, Jonathan (Jordan Elsass) is a popular football player with a girlfriend back in Metropolis, but shy introvert brother Jordan (Alex Garfin) doesn’t seem like he’d be missing much. Neither of the boys knows, at first, that their father is also Superman, but their grandfather, General Sam Lane (Dylan Walsh), sure does as he often sends missions Clark’s way to protect the country. To be sure, this Superman is no mere government lap dog, but he does have a close working relationship with the DoD.
Oh, and then one of the twins starts to develop superpowers like Clark’s, and it’s the quieter Jordan who can suddenly if sporadically demonstrate superhuman strength.
That’s not a bad premise, and it helps that despite the fact that both Hoechlin and Tullock first played their respective characters on Supergirl that Superman & Lois is going for a very different tone than all of the other Arrowverse shows (well, I think since I honestly haven’t seen much of Batwoman–see the first paragraph of this review for why–and Black Lightning only became an Arrowverse show somewhat retroactively during their version of Crisis on Infinite Earths). Supergirl itself is coming to an end soon, and that series always combined a rather lighthearted tone with blatantly obvious and unsubtle political allegory. The Flash seems to be largely running on fumes at the moment. Even Legends of Tomorrow, a show that embraced how ridiculous it was and went for it, seems to be wearing a bit thin for me of late. But Superman & Lois actually had a fairly serious tone, with a subdued color pallet and a more nuanced look at its characters. Like Supergirl, Superman & Lois isn’t necessarily afraid to get political, but rather than make the protagonists ideological enemies also serve as actual villains with all the subtly of a sledgehammer to the skull (how many times did a bad guy called Supergirl a “nasty woman” after Donald Trump debated Hilary Clinton?), Superman & Lois puts the differences in politics in the mouth of Smallville resident Kyle Cushing (Erik Valdez), the firefighter husband of Clark’s childhood friend Lana Lang (Emmanuelle Chriqui), and while he is welcoming to Edge’s billionaire as a possible economic savior to Smallville and initially hostile to Lois’s belief that Edge is up to no good (and he is), Kyle likewise makes many points about how a place like Smallville really does need the economic boosts, that no one else is helping them, and Lois doesn’t really have an answer for that. It’s moments like that, showing that rural people have concerns that are not often addressed by government or other factors and there are some problems being able to benchpress a 747 can’t solve, that show a much more mature handling of political differences. For all Kyle in the early episodes just comes across as hostile to Lois, he is gradually shown to be a man who really cares about his town and mostly just doesn’t trust a big city reporter to know better than he does what Smallville really needs.
So, between a season-long plot involving the possibility of Kryptonians coming back from the other side at the expense of the human race, a mysterious armored man with a thing against Superman, Jordan’s superpowered growing pains, and Jonathan’s need to adjust to being the “normal” brother, what about the two title characters? I’d say they both did well. Hoechlin’s Superman is an earnest husband and father, a man who embodies what Superman generally is as someone who is good, kind, and decent, and yet never comes across as phony. He’s humble, not a show-off, and he will do what it takes to protect others. As for Tulloch, her Lois is a character who seems to have seen it all but won’t back down to any threat to her family or her mission to continually tell the truth. There’s a bit of world-weariness to her at times, befitting for someone who has reported on and seen as many things as she has in life, such that the flashback episode showing how the two met suggests just how special Clark-as-Superman must have been to someone like Lois Lane. The two show that heroism here is a team effort, and while Lois may not be punching out the bad guys, she is just as much there to use her own skillsets to do her part. There’s a bond and a trust between Lois and Clark, and that and the family dynamic with the more serious tone to what could otherwise be a very silly show made this a rather well-done and memorable first season of television.
Grade: A-
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