Smallville: The Series - worth it?

But after two seasons of awkward but basically unconsummated romantic tension, I was really sick of that aspect of the show.

Change that “two” for a seven, and you can say almost the same thing about X-Files. I spent most of the X-Files wanting them to finally get together (am I a shipper?).

One other thing about X-Files; in German they address each other as “Sie” (honorific pronoun), while in Spanish they addess as “tu” (2nd person singular). I always found the “tu” weird, being used to watch the show in German, using honorifics.

IT WON’T END!!!

It is getting a 10th season

How does this show manage to live on?

On 20-something beefcake and titties.

It’s got a fairly rabid fanbase, and sadly it’s one of the CW’s few successful shows besides Supernatural and Vampire Diaries.

Tom is 33! He’s my age!? Man, I need to hit the gym. ;)

Number of reasons. The main one is the CW doesn’t have a whole lot better than Smallville, so it hangs around. Moving to the less competitive Friday night apparently also helped. Kreuk leaving was a blessing - Erica Durance as Lois Lane is a much better actress with a better dynamic with Clark (the on-again off-again Lana Lang had been dragged out far too long - besides, who’d want her after she had sex with Lex even if she became his ex). How it survived a rather awkward transition from High School to the Daily Planet I’m not quite sure (beyond the network didn’t have a lot better going on then, either). 10 years of a scripted drama is doing pretty good these days considering the over-abundance of “reality” shows.

Yeah, but he’s playing a 20-something. Which is why I didn’t edit myself. :-p

He has good hair genes, too.

While I live in thrillville that Lana is gone (YEAH!) and I adore Lois, I want Superman and a 10th season means that won’t happen again THIS year either. That’s where my own personal frustration comes from, but on the other hand I’ve been watching this show for 9 years, and I still enjoy it (mostly), so all around I suppose this is good news indeed.

Not even Iraqi prisoners have to endure that much torture.

The fucker still can’t fly.

He is the same age as Chrisopher Reeve when he filmed Superman 4.

Has an actor ever phoned it in more than Tom Welling has this season? Somehow he’s still likable, but he’s reading every line like he’s, well, literally reading a line off a piece of paper.

Also, Erica Durance is in her mid-50’s.

Welling is limited in range, but he’s pretty good in his scenes with the 32 year old Durance (actresses traditionally fudge their age by a couple of years, but over 20 years would be kind of obvious).

I still think Chloe is the hottest thing on that show. But other than that, I find it completely unwatchable.

I watch it for Chloe and for the overall DC comics Universe oriented episodes.

My teenage daughter and I have been watching it together for a few months and we’re up to Season 5 now. The quality of the writing often has us either falling asleep or writhing in pain, but occasionally an episode will stand out. So far, it hasn’t been quite as bad as the general sentiment in this thread originally led me to believe, but maybe that’s just because we’re suckers for the genre.

It’s an uneven show. A number of stinkers and yawners but every now and then there’s a pretty good episode. It hasn’t lasted this long by being uniformly awful - the basic concept was good and will resonate with young people: the struggle to find one’s way and definition in life. Though quite frankly at this point there’s no reason for Clark not to adopt the costume beyond it was one of the rules of the show’s concept (though the entire nation would simultaneously smack their foreheads and say, “Clark is Superman”).

I was being sarcastic, but she in no way resembles 32. And the erotic archery scene between Green Arrow and Chloe a few weeks ago displayed more chemistry in 90 seconds than in five years of Welling and Durance.

Generally speaking, the season finales tend to be pretty strong, setting up crazyass cliffhangers for main characters. Thing is, they never have a plan on how they’re getting out of those situations, so the season premieres just slap the reset button. That’s the main problem with the show. They spend long arcs setting up supposedly incredibly important plotlines just to either forget about them or reveal they’re useless boondoggles.

  • Remember the spaceship from season 1? Whatever happened to that?
  • What about the mysterious caves? Abandoned those too.
  • Chloe died at the end of season 3 when a building blew up, Lex was poisoned, etc, all wrapped up in 1 episode
  • Remember the episode where lana turned into an evil witch? Yeah, that happened. Why? Due to the mysterious crystals in season 4. Remember those, with Lana’s tramp stamp? Never explained why those crystals, which created the fortress of solitude, would give Lana a tramp stamp and turn her into a witch for just under 20 minutes of hilarity.
  • Remember when Lana married Lex? An entire season of weird scenes there. He somehow induced “fake” pregnancy in her. Nobody knows why, it was never explained, as far as I could tell.
  • Remember when clark went to college? He was in braniac’s classroom. Whatever happened to his matriculation? Did he drop out? Lana was in a sorority too, as I recall, briefly.
  • Remember the jimmy olson character? They had that bumbling jackass marry Chloe, then managed to kill him off, killing an iconic superman supporting character, then at the funeral announced that his name was Henry “Jimmy” Olson, with his little cousin Jimmy “The Real Jimmy” Olson looking on.
  • Whatever actually happened to Lex? He was at the fortress of solitude when it blew up or something, then the next season he was peeping on the hot chick they brought in to replace him in a CGI costume with green goo pumping in his veins, then the green arrow d-bag killed him.
  • Remember when the token black character left the show for 3 seasons, only to come back for an entire episode bought and paid for by a gum company? Literally, the plot was about delicious gum that gives you superpowers because it was somehow touched by “meteor rock”, the startrek technobabble of smallville. It was set at a gum factory, with the logo everywhere, and they had a concert with the gum logo right in front of your face. Every single scene had that gum’s logo somewhere. It was some off-brand gum, I forget the name, not like bubbilicious or trident or juicyfruit.
  • How many times have main characters “died” in season finales, only to be brought back to life in season premieres with an entirely unsatisfying explanation or no explanation at all beyond “I got away”? I count eleven.

The above stream of consciousness brought to you by the extraordinarily shittastic program, Smallville. There’s nobody steering the boat. They just do things that they think sound cool at the time, but even if you look at it as a collection of standalone episodes it falls flat.

Now don’t get me wrong, I know most comics lack cohesion and have silly storylines too. But somehow that doesn’t work for me on TV. What’s endearing in a comic book is insulting in a weekly TV show.

Smallville blows goats. It’s embarrassingly bad. Its only redeeming quality is the hotness of its women. The CW sure can pick 'em. But if I just want to look at hot chicks, I’ll watch a much better, less embarrassing show on the CW-- motherfucking Gossip Girl.

Not really endearing in a comic either. Bad is bad. Comic moment of the day: