mallville is just another sleepy rural community, which bills itself the creamed-corn capital of the world, until a spectacular meteor shower devastates Main Street—and seeds the surrounding countryside with a glowing green substance capable of causing bizarre mutations.
Most locals don't know that the shower also delivered a young alien boy in a spaceship. Found, and adopted, by the childless farmers named Jonathan and Martha Kent (Schneider, Annette O'Toole), the boy is named Clark and raised as part of a normal American family. A decent kid, beset as a teenager by his hopeless crush on the local beauty, Lana Lang (Kreuk), Clark (Welling) is stifled by the restrictions his secretive parents have placed on him to conceal his true origins, include prohibitions against ever using his super-strength or super-speed in public. Surely, he reasons, it wouldn't be all that bad if he could just join the football team!
Meanwhile, the local fertilizer plant is taken over by the young Lex Luthor (Rosenbaum), who lost his hair during his childhood encounter with the same glowing green substance now inflicting super-powered threats on the community. Lex is a well-meaning young man with a deep resentment toward his father, the ruthless industrialist Lionel (Glover). When his life is saved by Clark, he claims the strange young man as a best friend, never guessing that fate will someday cast them as bitter enemies.
The small-town days of a future legend
The WB series addresses the formative years of Clark Kent, before he takes up the famous red and blue costume and begins defending Metropolis as Superman. Although Clark's wardrobe is sneakily limited to bright blues and reds, the actual superhero outfit is nowhere in sight. This Clark has not yet learned his full capabilities, nor has he decided the course of his life. The focus of the show is how he forges the character and the values that will someday make him a hero.
The benefit of all this is, oddly enough, to restore some of the mythic grandeur Superman loses when blue tights and a red cape are just parts of the uniform he wears to work in the morning. But knowledge that this future awaits him is essential. The drawback is, alas, just as simple: by definition, the individual episodes that lead him to adulthood don't matter a hell of a lot. We already know that Clark's going to turn out OK. We already know what he's going to do with his life. We even know that his painful early love for Lana is going out the window, perhaps literally, sometime before he meets a lady reporter named Lois Lane. As a result, the rate at which the various jigsaw pieces accrue to form a picture which we're assumed to already know can be slow to the rate of distraction. Sometimes that's a good thing, in that the formative experiences glossed over for most of the character's 60-year history are revealed to have comprised a slow and often difficult process. But it can be a bad thing, too, in that whenever progress seems too static it's hard not to wish we could race ahead on this path the characters walk with such halting, tentative steps.
The one real source of suspense is the character of Lex Luthor. It's preordained that he'll someday be Clark's greatest enemy, which is why it's so startling to see him as an egotistical but essentially decent young man, with a social conscience that sets him at odds with his father, and a genuine affection for the strange Kent kid. The indications of the darkness within him are undeniable, but at this point they're overwhelmed by his remaining humanity. Seriously: Watching this guy try to do the right thing, most of the time—and watching everybody hassle him for it—is very much an exercise in witnessing the first few chapters in a tragedy where we already know the ending. One suspects that if the series lasts long enough to reach its preordained conclusion, it's Luthor's descent into villainy, and not Clark's ascent to heroism, that will resonate with the greatest degree of emotional impact.
Tom Welling is effective and charismatic as Clark; Kristin Kreuk is almost too radiant as Lana. Sam Jones III, John Schneider, John Glover and Michael Rosenbaum are all effective in their supporting roles. But Annette O'Toole deserves special mention. She played Lana Lang in the movies and is a still relatively youthful Martha Kent here. Both she and the character deserve better. The scripts assign almost all of the "wise parent" scenes to Pa, instead of her, which might be a dodge to prevent young Clark from looking like too much of a mama's boy. As a result, there are way, way too many shots of her tilting her head with silent motherly concern—up to a dozen per episode, an average that reduces her to the Carol Brady of science fiction. Would it really jeopardize Superman's heroic image were she permitted to do more than fret for the camera?
