Smallville
Cast & Key People
▶
Our Review
No flights, no tights: ten years of Clark Kent growing up in Kansas before he ever earns the cape. Smallville turned the world’s most familiar origin story into a teen drama with a Kryptonite engine, meteor freaks of the week and all, and somehow made it work for a decade.
The early seasons are a monster-of-the-week high school show with a genuinely strange Lana-and-Clark triangle, and the show matured alongside its audience: Lex Luthor’s slow-motion fall (Michael Rosenbaum at his career best) is one of TV’s great tragic arcs. Tom Welling plays restraint beautifully, Allison Mack’s Chloe was the fan-favorite heart long before anyone said the word Lois, and the final season finally pays the flight it withheld for 217 episodes. The definitive Superman origin on screen, messy, heartfelt, and unrepeatable.
