Smallville ran for ten years before ending not long ago. Today we've got Arrow, The Flash, Agents of SHIELD, Agent Carter of SHIELD, Gotham, and Constantine, with Supergirl, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Daredevil, Iron Fist, Powers, and a reboot of Heroes on the way, and God knows what else in development. There's a crazy number of superhero shows on TV right now. Like with the Lord of the Rings movies, the (upcoming) Star Wars sequels, the Spider-Man movies, it's the kind of thing that would've seemed too good to be true if you'd told me about it in the 80s. Unlike most of those things, though, maybe it really is too good to be true -- most of these shows are not very good.
My one concern with this entry is that I don't want this blog to just be a collection of things I don't like, you know? There is plenty on television that is either awful or, at least, Not My Kind of Thing. I don't think it's worth my time to talk about that television, nor your time to read about it.
So why do I feel like I want to write about superhero shows when I think they're largely mediocre? I guess because I love the genre. I guess because I'm invested. And that's a different feeling about mediocrity, a different experience of mediocrity, than the mediocrity of House or Two and a Half Men.
I don't know for sure if comics or television provided my first introduction to superheroes. There were, actually, a lot of superhero shows on TV when I was a kid, if you count the reruns and the cartoons: Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, Adam West as Batman, The Courtship of Eddie's Father's Bill Bixby in The Incredible Hulk, the original Spider-Man cartoon, the Superfriends and related DC superhero cartoons, and the often-forgotten live-action Spider-Man show with Nicholas Hammond:
I was particularly a fan of Spider-Man and Batman, which I think is as much an effect of the era as of the innate qualities of those characters: there may have been few real classics being produced in superhero TV in the 60s and 70s, but the best of what was made always had Spider-Man or Batman in it. It probably helps that, although Spider-Man has actual super powers and Batman doesn't, they were both street-level heroes who didn't seem out of place fighting gangs and bank robbers (or "supervillains" in the form of bank robbers with outlandish costumes). Superman is a hard sell on television because he's so fucking powerful, how do you challenge him week in and week out, without a movie-level budget?
Comics-wise, I started with hand-me-downs and borrowed comics from older friends, like Jason, who was a few years older than me and had the cabin next to ours up at the lake. Jason had a bunch of DC comics that he'd bring up every summer, including a ton of Superman comics (and Superman Family, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, etc) with that era's focus on imaginary stories, red kryptonite-induced transformations, and the many other colors of kryptonite (the below list isn't even complete).That Marvel Team-Up issue below is the first Marvel comic I owned. Both these comics highlight some pretty stark differences between comic book superheroes and the TV superheroes at the time. TV superheroes lived in a much, much more normal world than the "real" Marvel or DC universes. In most shows, the protagonist was the only superhero in the world (the cartoons were the exception here), and often there weren't even any supervillains with actual powers - maybe you'd have a mummy now and then, or a commie robot or something. But forget about Spider-Man fighting Dr Octopus, or teaming up with the Invisible Girl.
The Incredible Hulk was one of the most successful of these shows -- one of the few to go more than a season or two -- and it's a pretty good example of how "superheroes" were approached. As everyone knows, the Incredible Hulk was just The Fugitive with a new skin: David Banner ("Bruce" was too gay for TV) was on the run because of havoc caused by his alter ego, The Hulk, and pursuing a cure to his condition, while being pursued in turn by investigative journalist McGee, who is determined to prove the Hulk exists. Like with the Fugitive or the A-Team, this builds some dramatic tension into every episode, because the main character has to stay on the move to stay safe; like those shows, it avoids worldbuilding or significant character development, because every episode the action has moved to a different dot on the blue highways, with a different guest cast and a different dilemma to be solved in an hour.
Until the X-Files popularized the "monster of the week" episode, this was the basic form that adventure shows took, whether their protagonists were superheroes, fugitive surgeons framed for murder, talking cars and their drivers, or an alien and his half-alien son. Like the rest of TV, in the days before VCRs and a post-broadcast market, most shows leaned pretty heavily on a formula, and continuity didn't change much, except occasionally in season premieres (often to tinker with the formula or cast, quickly setting up a new formula rather than an alternative to formula).
The adventure shows disappeared over time. Okay, it's not a genre with clearly defined boundaries, but I think of it as a 60-minute light drama in which every episode finds the protagonist(s) righting a wrong - whether fighting a monster, stopping an assassination, helping a family-owned farm stop the evil corporation from buying it out, whatever - while staying distinct from the police procedural. The 80s version of the genre was as influenced by The Dukes of Hazzard and Wonder Woman as by The Fugitive. I think it's easy to forget just how big this was. Look at 1987-1988:
Sundays: Werewolf and Supercarrier
Mondays: MacGyver
Wednesdays: Highway to Heaven
Fridays: The Highwayman
Saturdays: Once a Hero
That's six shows in an era of three and a half networks (Fox only had programming two nights a week, like the cable channels today), but I'm leaving out the detective shows, which sort of straddled the tonal line between adventure shows and cop shows: Spenser for Hire, Murder She Wrote, Magnum P.I., Sonny Spoon, Jake and the Fatman, J.J. Starbuck, The Law and Harry McGraw, Simon and Simon, Private Eye, and the when-it-was-good-it-was-very-very-good Moonlighting.
Speaking of Moonlighting, Lois and Clark is a pretty great example of what's wrong with superhero TV, insofar as it followed the pattern of reassuring the viewer (and other decision-makers) by making a show that was a light and unchallenging version of a proven success, with a few costumes thrown in. It did give us this, though:
The early superhero TV shows often shot themselves in the foot by reinventing their superhero characters and risking the alienation of comic book fans. TV's Banner isn't exposed to gamma radiation -- traumatized by his inability to prevent his wife dying in a car accident, he studies the phenomenon of people calling on unexpected reserves of strength in crises and experiments on himself, turning himself into the Hulk. Which really makes no more sense than gamma radiation, but no gamma means no Rick Jones (as well as robbing the show of an easy way to introduce supervillains), one of the Marvel Universe's more enduring characters.
Probably the most egregious examples of reinventing the comic book character are Shazam, in which Captain Marvel's origin drops the wizard Shazam and has CM traveling the country in a Winnebago ...
... and even more inexplicably, Hanna Barbera's cartoon version of The Thing, in which the Fantastic Four don't even show up and Benjy Grimm is a teenager who transforms into The Thing with magic rings, an even more substantial change than the Hulk's.
I actually really loved the Thing cartoon as a kid! But it bore almost no resemblance to the comic book.
Thing is, I love the superhero genre. I still read comics, though fewer of them (Captain Marvel, Silver Surfer, and Star-Lord are among my favorites in years). I have a superhero novel in progress, inspired largely by the Marvel comics of the 70s and those Superman imaginary stories I grew up with. The mediocrity of superhero TV shows is more of a nuisance to me than that of police procedurals or Quirky Detectives.
There are two ... axes, I guess, of mediocrity to talk about here. First, most of these shows just aren't very engaging - whatever the flaws or virtues of their take on the superhero-specific elements, they're just not especially well-written or -acted. Second, those superhero-specific elements themselves are often handled in the dullest way possible.
Second point first. Like I said, in most superhero shows, the protagonist is the only super-powered being in the whole damn world. Smallville changed that, but for the most part it stuck to the slightly broader version: the source of the protagonist's powers is the only source of super powers in the whole damn world. I certainly didn't watch all of Smallville, but apart from the occasional guest appearance of Aquaman or whatever, most of the superbeings were either fellow Kryptonians or got their powers from "meteor rock."
You know what was great about the X-Files? It wasn't just about UFOs. It wasn't just about vampires. It was about UFOs and vampires and alien abductions and werewolves and prehistoric mites and cockroach robots and clones and mutant contortionists. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer didn't limit herself to vampires -- or to the idea that everything supernatural in Sunnydale came from the Hellmouth or shared a common origin with the Slayer.
Interesting worlds are messy and complicated. Somehow the kids who grew up with Superfriends -- with a Kryptonian, Gotham's mystery man, the prince of Atlantis, a space cop with a magic ring, an Amazonian warrior, and Apache Chief fighting robots, aliens, and Solomon Grundy -- grew up and decided that a TV show where more than one thing is different from the real world would just be too confusing.
That's what's GREAT about them. People don't like soap operas DESPITE the evil twins and amnesia and betrayals. Nobody watched the first season of Desperate Housewives thinking, boy, this would be great if not for the blackmail plot and the narration by the ghost of the dead friend with a secret. But so many superhero shows are put together as though the audience is expected to tolerate the superpowers and costume, while mostly being interested in some lukewarm love triangle and a couple of half-baked mysteries.
That brings me back to the first point. The main problem with superhero shows, I think, is one that plagues science fiction shows in general -- speculative fiction shows in general, if you like:
Almost every science fiction show is worse than the non-science fiction show it most closely resembles.
Maybe that's why Battlestar Galactica is so good - it doesn't really resemble any non-sf shows. It's impossible to imagine what the show would be, without its Cylons and spaceships and mythic trappings.
Most superhero shows aren't shows about superheroes so much as they're shows starring superheroes. They could as easily be shows about detectives or fugitive surgeons.
And just like that Marvel brand name undoubtedly was sufficient for the show to be renewed, other superhero shows always seem to be put together as though -- even though the writers avoid the superhero genre's conventions and messiness as much as possible -- the fact that a superhero is present is supposed to be enough to attract our interest. Science fiction shows have been doing that for ages - a few robots or aliens cover up the sub-standard acting or reliance on formula, and the fans gobble it up often enough that it pays off.
Even Agent Carter, which as a miniseries doesn't need to depend on formula plots to kill time, and which is significantly better than Agents of SHIELD, is pretty awful if you gauge it as a period show (someone even coughs into their elbow, for Christ's sake). As a period show, it reads like it's made by people who read the back cover blurbs of a couple books about the period and decided that the most important difference other than the fashion was that since the main character is a woman, sexism needs to be front and center. Not realistic or well-written sexism. Just a bunch of buffoons constantly needling Carter for being a lady. Nevermind that the really insidious fact of the sexism of the period - or sexism now - is that very intelligent, competent, skilled, kind, and gracious men are just as capable of being sexist assholes as the rest are.
If you pay attention to my complaints, you may not be surprised that my favorite superhero show right now is The Flash, who lives in a world that actually has other super-powered beings in it. Time travel even features in the plot! It's a far cry from perfect -- I don't watch every episode, and it's not good enough to bump into the "stuff I watch with Caitlin" priority tier -- but it's a good deal better than Arrow, for instance, which I just can't take seriously despite having given it several tries, or the awful stink of SHIELD. (Gotham started out promising, but is already hamstrung by the problems introduced by its premise -- how does it plan to fill five or six years when it's having this much trouble in its first season?)
The show that gets everything right is Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which happens to be a cartoon. It might be tangential enough to merit its own post except that talking about it in this one gives me an opportunity to focus on the positive.
Airing from 2008 to 2011 on the Cartoon Network and available on DVD and Netflix now, Batman: The Brave and the Bold was the perfect way to do a Batman cartoon without mimicking the Art Deco cartoon of the 90s. Like the Silver Age comic for which it's named, each cartoon features Batman teaming up with another hero -- usually more than one, since the cold open at the beginning is usually a separate adventure. (In fact, the cold opens feature some of the show's most brilliant storytelling, managing to conjure up so much in so little time.) The cold opens sometimes tied in to later main episode storylines -- Equinox and Starro recur as villains in the first two seasons, for instance.
It's a perfect model for how a live-action show should be done, especially something continuity-heavy like the X-Men. Even a Dr Strange show would benefit from dropping us into the tenth year of Stephen's stint as Sorcerer Supreme and revealing his origin over flashbacks in the cold opens of the first season, let's say. Throw Dormammu, Clea and Umar, Baron Mordo, and Nightmare at us all at once. Make references to Strange's former membership in the Defenders, and have the Silver Surfer or the Black Knight show up for help once in a while. We can handle it, I promise.
As an aside, although I decided only to focus on comic book adaptations here rather than original superhero shows like Heroes, there are two British shows of the latter category worth drawing attention to, both of which are available on Hulu: Misfits and No Heroics. Misfits is the more dramatic and goes on for more seasons, though it also gets gradually less engaging as half the cast leaves; it's of the "something happens and suddenly there are superpowers" genre, while No Heroics is a sitcom set in a superhero-filled world.
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