“Smallville”creatorsAl Gough and Miles Millarare currently panning streaming gold with Netflix’s”Wednesday,” so they’re not exactly desperate to relive old glories. Even so, the “young Superman”-themed show ran from 2001 to 2011 — first on The WB, then on The CW. As such, it was a major part of the pair’s lives for a whole decade, and started well before the superhero movie boom. It’s easy to wonder what the show would be like if they made it today, for audiences that are intimately familiar with the ins and outs of live-action superhero storytelling.Would a remake subvert or exceed expectations, or be content to tread the familiar path?
The original “Smallville”took flight as a highly watchable coming-of-age teen drama, but if you ask Gough and Millar, the answer is that the fast-and-loose way the show was able to treat established Superman lore means it would never get made today.
“The whole premise of the show was not canon,” Millar told The Hollywood Reporter in 2022. “The idea that Clark arrived in the meteor shower that killed people, and that Lex was there. All those things were completely new, added to the mythology of Superman, but we categorically would not be allowed to make that show and make those changes today.”
Smallville was a child of its time
Not only do Millar and Gough say they believe that a contemporary version of “Smallville” would be dead in the water, but they add that they’d actively opt against revisiting the project if the opportunity presented itself.
“I feel like we were very, very fortunate to do the show when we did it because we got to make the show we wanted to make, and frankly, there was no committee sitting over us telling us what we could or couldn’t do,” Gough said. “…We got to make the show we wanted to make, which, we wouldn’t be allowed to make that show today. There were so many deviations from the canon. One generation’s heresy is the next generation’s gospel.”
Millar and Gough already propelled “Smallville” into the ranks of the best CW shows of all timeonce. Since they both recognize the extreme difficulty of capturing that lighting in a contemporary bottle and the animated “Smallville” sequel series planned by Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum has also stalled, it seems that the series is destined to stay that way, too.
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