STARS ON SCREEN

History lesson:

It’s an origin story with which most pop culture consumers are no doubt familiar: an infant is sent fleeing from a dying planet in a spacecraft that crashes on Earth. He’s found by a pair of childless farmers who raise him with a strong moral compass despite his otherworldly abilities, and when he grows up, he uses his superpowers to become humanity’s greatest champion.

Superman’s beginnings have been visited time and time again both in comics and on screen, but what’s been less explored is just what was going on on his home planet of Krypton in the decades before its destruction. Syfy’s new series “Krypton” aims to fill that void by following Seg-El, a young Kryptonian from a family with a tarnished reputation as troublemakers, who just so happens to be Superman’s grandfather. The superhero drama premieres Wednesday, March 21.

The smouldering Cameron Cuffe stars as Seg-El in the first leading role for the young actor, who’s previously appeared in “Time After Time” and British series “The Halycon.” Starring alongside him is Shaun Sipos (“Dark Matter”) as a time traveler from the future who brings Seg-El a message about Krypton’s future — and it isn’t a pleasant one.

Georgina Campbell (“Broadchurch”) stars as Lyta Zod, a warrior and Seg-El’s secret lover, with Ian McElhinney (“Game of Thrones”), Elliot Cowan (“Da Vinci’s Demons”), Rasmus Hardiker (“Thunderbirds Are Go”) and Wallis Day (“Hollyoaks”) rounding out the main cast.

Kryptonians have been hot on screens in recent years. Although Superman movies “Man of Steel” (2013) and “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” (2016) both met with lukewarm reception from critics, they performed well at the box office, and CW’s “Supergirl” continues to be a hit with critics and audiences alike.

“Krypton,” though, peeks into the past to reveal the untold story of what happened Wallis Day as seen in “Krypton” long before Superman was even born. The new series premieres Wednesday, March 21, on Syfy.

Little smart-alecs:

Kids. Who hasn’t felt a little bit dumb when one of them pulls out an obscure fact, corrects a spelling mistake or solves a math problem while the adults are still fumbling for their calculators? There sure are some brainy children out there, and NBC’s new summer game show celebrates some of the smartest kids in America.

“Genius Junior” premieres Sunday, March 18, on the peacock network, with host Neil Patrick Harris (“How I Met Your Mother”) overseeing 12 teams of little geniuses competing to win a pretty big financial grant.

In each one-hour episode, the teams of three — which have hilarious names such as “The Fast and the Curious,” “The Brainy Bunch” and “The Dork Side” — compete in a series of rounds, each one more difficult than the last. With a clock ticking down, the kids are challenged with doing complex math equations, memorizing the country’s whole highway system and spelling complicated words backwards.

It should be pretty clear that these kids can’t just be geniuses in one subject — they need be masters of them all. In the final round, the team that’s done the best over the course of the episode takes on The Cortex, where its members try to build up their prize fund, but this test makes the earlier challenges look like kindergarten.

The smartest kids on television all come together in one place in “Genius Junior” with Neil Patrick Harris on Sunday, March 18, on NBC.

Pilot investigator:

CBS has found its Magnum. The network, which has already greenlit a reboot of “Murphy Brown” for the 2018-19 TV season, is also working on pilots for reboots of “Magnum, P.I.” and “Cagney & Lacey.” Neither of them has yet received an order for a full series.

Jay Hernandez (“A Bad Moms Christmas,” 2017) has been cast in “Magnum P.I.” as the titular hero, a role that was famously played in the 1980 to 1988 series by Tom Selleck (“Blue Bloods”). Whether he’ll wear open-buttoned Hawaiian shirts, a Detroit Tigers ball cap and sport an impressive mustache like Selleck did remains to be seen. If picked up to series, “Magnum P.I” will be Hernandez’s first series regular role since he starred in the Fox drama “Gang Related” in 2014.

In the potential reboot, Thomas Magnum is an ex-Navy SEAL who returns home from a series of missions in Afghanistan and becomes a private investigator. Of course, the series is still in the pilot stage, when the studio and network test out a potential new show’s formula, so keep in mind that any of these details can change between now and a potential series premiere.

“Magnum P.I.’s” pilot is being written and produced by Peter Lenkov, the man who brought remakes of “Hawaii Five-0” and “MacGyver” to life. With “Hawaii Five-0” currently in its eighth season and “MacGyver” in its second, if anyone can recreate the Magnum magic for a modern audience, it’s probably him.