Lois & Clark: Adventures in TV Land

My parents have one of those cable packages that has virtually every channel under the sun. It even has the West coast feeds of certain stations so, I guess, if you miss a program you can catch it 3 hours later? Home for the holidays, stumbling through the mess of channels, there was a pleasant surprise airing somewhere in the upper thousands: Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

Which is, let’s face it, the best superhero show ever on television, even beating out animated classics like Batman: The Animated Series. It might even be my favorite representation of Superman ever.

Superman is a character a lot of people find issue with. He has pretty much every power under the sun (depending, I guess, on when he’s being written and who has the creative reins) and can do anything, so I can kind of see where these people are coming from. It becomes a problem seeing who you can pit Superman against that actually creates a threat.

But on the other hand, I kind of like that approach. It makes me think of the problem a lot of Fantasy authors talk about with regards to their characters over the progression of a series. Namely, if the character gets too strong too quickly or accomplishes too much too soon, how can you possibly make the next installment more interesting? What can their possibly be to do once you’ve taken do Sauron and defeated the greatest evil in the land?

Superman lets you skip all of that and say: Look, he’s not going to have a challenge in that typical sense, he’s just not, so you’re going to have to find other ways to tell a compelling story. It’s something that I think requires that we see a bigger slice of Clark than of Superman to make the story compelling. We absolutely need to see that side of him that’s vulnerable, that’s very human, because maybe bullets can’t hurt him but moral and social problems definitely can.

Watching Lois & Clark years ago probably informed a lot of what I want out of heroic fantasy. I like the trappings, the powers, the feats, as much as the next guy, but what I really want–crave–out of these kinds of stories is the human core at the center of it all. I really wish we had a series that was just about Bruce Wayne, too. Batman is fun and all, but I want to see how he deals with his non-suit hours, how he manages that split in personality, and I want to see more about his relationship with the other people in the bat-family.

Most of the time all we get is flashes in the pan from comics and movies. A scene or two with the hero unmasked, a backdrop to show us what they’re doing outside the costume, a means to set up the inevitable actions. When deciding which superhero thing to watch, I’ll pick Lois & Clark every time.