Smallville Gets New Showrunners

There is a story on SuperHeroHype.com today that says the creators of Smallville, Alfred Gough and Miles Miller, are leaving the show after this season.

Good news, friends.  They had some good stories over the years, but for the most part Smallville never really lived up to it’s potential.  It’s been a show I watch out of habit, and recently even that’s been a struggle.  The entire series feels so stretched out, and things that are happening this season should have happened years ago.  For example, Clark & Lana are finally together, 3 years after they graduated high school.  Mmmyea, Lana is Clark’s high school sweetheart.

Then, of course, they introduced the Green Arrow and the Justice League as guest stars.  This is fine with me, because the episodes where they show up are some of the best, but I can’t help but feel the reason they are there is because the writers just have no new material thanks to the mandate that Alfred Gough and Miles Miller set from the beginning:  “no tights, no flights.”

Essentially, the show they pitched to the WB was a Superman-in-his-teens story, and therefore he wouldn’t be flying or wearing the costume.  Ever.  For some reason they’ve stuck to that promise no matter what, and the show has suffered from it.  They didn’t realize they told all the stories they could tell without any flights or tights.  Clark’s natural progression is to turn into Superman.  He discovered all of his other powers pretty quick in the early years with only one left… flying.  But they couldn’t do it, because “no flights” was no doubt hung in the writers room.

Well, that idea may have worked for the first few seasons, but it’s been more than seven years.  In three years, it will be a decade.  Teenagers are only teenagers for seven years, so the original pitch should be changed a little.  No doubt the WB (sorry, the CW) realized that and kicked them out to hire people who would be willing to grow with the story.

Season 8, to premiere in the fall, will apprently have new executives and presumably those new executives will bring new writing talent and new ideas.

Long story short:  I was going to give up on Smallville, but maybe I’ll stick around.  Word on the street is that Lex Luthor and Lana Lang won’t be around next year because they chose not to renew their contracts.  That means the writers will have to introduce some other villians and maybe even take Clark out of Smallville.

If it were up to me, I’d propose ending the show after this year, having a one or two year hiatus, and then relaunching the whole thing with a new name, “Metropolis,” which would be a weekly live action Superman show.  And the Justice League would be invited, too, but, y’know, with Clark actually participating.