How Superhero TV Took Flight
Comic-book series once seemed self-consciously nerdy, but today caped crusaders dominate the small screen
Comic-book series once seemed self-consciously nerdy, but today caped crusaders dominate the small screen.
Plus: The Five Best Superhero Shows Ever
No tights, no flights.” This was the mantra of the creative team behind Smallville, this century’s first significant TV show based on a comic book. The tale of a teenage Clark Kent (Tom Welling) still living on the family farm in Kansas, the series was made under the belief that it would have to end the moment he became Superman. But there was also a sense at the time that superheroes had fallen so far out of the mainstream that a cape, flying, or even using the word “superpowers” (Clark liked to talk about his “abilities”) might scare off potential viewers who found all the four-color trappings a bit too weird or geeky.
Twenty years after Smallville debuted, the geeks have inherited the Earth, and the world of comic-book television has room for plenty of men and women in tights, some of them flying, some with esoteric mental powers, some with actual functioning gills. Buoyed by an explosion in TV outlets, plus radical shifts in what digital effects can create and viewers will accept, superhero series are everywhere, with a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and powers. In late 2019, Welling even played Clark Kent again in Crisis on Infinite Earths, a sprawling TV-crossover event featuring dozens of costumed DC heroes from shows and films past and present. (Welling was one of three different Supermen involved, in fact, alongside Superman Returns star Brandon Routh and Tyler Hoechlin from the CW’s new Superman & Lois series.) Crisis’ vast array of characters, code names, powers, and technobabble about parallel universes simply wouldn’t have been possible in the early days of Smallville, either from a budget standpoint or producer confidence in what audiences would follow.
Crisis hasn’t even been the strangest supertrip television’s gone on in the past few years. Homelander (Antony Starr), the Superman stand-in from Amazon’s acidic superhero satire The Boys, has a lactation fetish. On HBO Max’s ode to superpowered oddness, Doom Patrol, Robotman — the brain of a dimwitted NASCAR driver (Brendan Fraser) encased in an old-timey metal body — got into a fight with his imaginary friend, Jesus Christ. And on Disney+’s new WandaVision, Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and the Vision (Paul Bettany) from the Avengers films appear to be living in classic sitcom homes like the ones in The Dick Van Dyke Show and Bewitched.
It’s been a fascinating evolution that’s both paralleled the rise of superhero films and run counter to them. And in television’s early days, the notion of something like The Boys or Crisis airing on the small screen would have seemed as fanciful as a man leaping tall buildings in a single bound.
There was a Superman on TV back then, played in stark black and white by George Reeves, aided by primitive special effects and bad guys who threw their empty pistols at him after their bullets bounced off his broad chest. But for a long time, the medium’s defining
costumed hero was Batman. As played with precision comic timing and unmistakable self-awareness by Adam West in ABC’s campy mid-Sixties series, Batman was a white-hot phenomenon that briefly dominated all of pop culture (Andy Warhol and Nico even dressed up as Burt Ward and West for a photo shoot) and cast a long shadow over the next several decades of comic-book adaptations. The Seventies Wonder Woman series with Lynda Carter was played a bit straighter, for instance, but still with a tone acknowledging that this was all silly, whereas a few years later Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno’s The Incredible Hulk
opted to keep things serious and relatively low-fi. Even attempts to try something different with the genre — CBS’ earnest, short-lived The Flash or ABC’s superpowered rom-com Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,
both relics of the Nineties — were hamstrung by what they could financially afford to show their heroes doing.
Eventually, the genre just fell out of fashion, even as shows without comic-book roots proved there was a growing appetite for comic-book trappings. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
was a traditional superhero show in everything but its point of origin and its heroine’s lack of costume. ( Smallville was created in part to give the WB another Buffy- esque show.) NBC’s Heroes briefly found huge success trying to pass off classic comic tropes as something it had invented wholesale. But with its pseudoscientific dialogue and pretentious narration, it seemed to be trying to distance itself from its inspiration — another superhero show apologizing for being a superhero show.
In 2012, the CW premiered Arrow, starring Stephen Amell as Oliver Queen, a.k.a. the heroic archer Green Arrow, who had been appearing in DC Comics since 1941. A transparent attempt to do a Batman show without Batman himself, Arrow nonetheless felt the need to hold viewers’ hands at first. Oliver had no powers, and even a code name was out at the beginning, with people referring to him as “the vigilante” or “the Hood.” (No one regularly called him Green Arrow until the fourth season.) In this case, though, it was immersion therapy. Arrow soon introduced Grant Gustin as speedster hero the Flash, eventually to headline his own spinoff that was followed by other DC-inspired series about Supergirl, Black Lightning, Batwoman, and a motley group of heroes known as the Legends of Tomorrow. As the number of shows in what came to be called “the Arrow-verse” expanded, so did a sense of what was possible on television — not just what could be accomplished technically, but what audiences would follow without hesitation. These series layered one nerd-approved concept (psychic gorilla villains, constant rewriting of the timeline, heroes created by merging two men into one) on top of another — until suddenly a crazy event like Crisis would seem perfectly natural.
The Arrow-verse shows were also helped by the exploding popularity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, which were mainstreaming concepts that network executives might have once dismissed as too niche. Superhero shows haven’t had the commercial success of their movie counterparts, but public embrace of quirky heroes like Groot, Doctor Strange, and Ant-Man made it easier in turn for a show like Legends of Tomorrow to let its freak flag fly.
DC insisted on keeping its movie and television universes separate, while Marvel shows like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Daredevil were stymied by a one-way relationship with the MCU. Eventually, the entire Marvel TV team was replaced by producers and stars from the film side: not just on WandaVision, but also on upcoming series focusing on Falcon, the Winter Soldier, Loki, and Hawkeye.
Those new shows will all be part of Disney+, and the explosion in streaming content has been particularly good for both the abundance and variety of comic-book TV. The defunct DC Universe service (most of it now on HBO Max) needed content that would feel different from the CW shows, which led not only to the eccentric wildness of Doom Patrol (whose outcast heroes include a genderqueer city street named Danny) but also to an unintentionally amusing Titans show, whose grim and gritty Robin (Brenton Thwaites) declares “Fuck Batman” in the first episode.
Even more anti-establishment, and with pastiches of iconic heroes rather than the actual thing, is The Boys, which savages the ubiquity of comic-book adaptations while suggesting superpowers would fundamentally corrupt anyone who got them. (In the second season, a Nazi seduces and then recruits Homelander to her side.) And after a failed Marvel partnership, Netflix turned elsewhere for supers, adapting indie comic The Umbrella Academy, which has narrative bumps but periodically hints that the next logical step for this kind of story is to do it as a musical.
Experimentation has been possible even with properties from the major comics publishers. FX’s Legion, about the mentally ill son (Dan Stevens) of Professor X, felt more indebted to psychedelia and French New Wave films than it did to any X-Men movie; it eventually lost the plot, but its style put most of its peers to shame. And one of the very best TV shows of the past several years — no “comic book” or “superhero” qualifier required — was Damon Lindelof ’s racially conscious reimagining of the groundbreaking Eighties comic
Watchmen, for HBO. More interested in being faithful to the spirit of the comic than the plot,
Watchmen dazzled and disturbed in equal measure, while its portrait of police officers dressed up as costumed vigilantes — and being secretly manipulated by white supremacists — turned out to be startlingly prescient about today’s America.
There will surely come a time, maybe very soon, when the conglomerates that own all this intellectual property (DC and Marvel are run, respectively, by Warner Bros. and Disney) will put the clamps on anything that doesn’t show absolute reverence and fealty to the most iconic versions of each character. But in this particular moment, “no tights, no flights” has briefly become “no limits.”