This 1990s TV show is a wholesome romance thinly disguised as science-fiction. Specifically, it’s about the relationship between two capable and kind-hearted but emotionally vulnerable young professionals. Rewatching Season 1 filled me with the glow of nostalgia.
See below for more on the characters, plot, and themes of the show. No spoilers.
Lois and Clark’s relationships with the other characters, i.e., their parents and work colleagues, are meaningful and wholesome too; in particular, Clark’s happily married parents provide important emotional support and moral guidance, while editor-in-chief Perry White serves as mentor in Lois and Clark’s professional life.
The main villain of the season, Lex Luthor, a secretly evil rich businessman of insatiable ambition and unbounded ruthlessness, often engages in overt moustache-twirling. The minor villains, whose misdeeds are often motivated by a romantic relationship or (more frequently) the failure of one, are discovered and defeated in the space of a single episode. Thus, in the plot realm, everything is black and white and tidy.
However, the rather implausible episode plots don’t matter as much as what Lois and Clark gradually learn about each other and themselves as a result of getting thrust into a series of odd situations. Sometimes the “science” that gives rise to these situations is an overt metaphor: an inventor literally makes himself invisible after becoming “invisible” in his marriage, for example. The themes the show explores include not just truth and justice, but also honesty and loyalty.
The setting of the show is Metropolis, a Midwestern city like Chicago, but not Chicago—although I can clearly see the skyline of Chicago, the city where I went to college, greenscreened into the background. The show takes place in a time of transition: reporters have internet-linked desktop computers, cordless phones, and fax machines, but not cell phones. Their monitors are CRTs. And, of course, they work for a newspaper that is still being physically printed. Those were the days, huh?
Like I said, the show fills me with nostalgia. I used to see rerun episodes of the show on broadcast TV. Later, I bought second-hand DVD box sets of Seasons 1 and 2. Later still, I got box sets for Seasons 3 and 4. There are some episodes I’ve seen several times, and probably others I’ve only seen once or twice. Unfortunately, I don’t have records of when I watched the discs; I only know I watched part of Season 1 in 2021 with Siqi, and Siqi and I just finished watching all of Season 1 from the beginning. I remembered a lot about the first few episodes, and almost nothing about the others, so it’s clear that I can remember pretty well back to 2021, but not very well back to whenever it was I watched Season 1 previously.
I think I remember learning from previously watching the special features that Deborah LeVine, who developed the show, intentionally made it feminist. Watching Season 1 this time around, I definitely noticed that Lois—who sometimes physically overcomes her adversaries, both men and women—isn’t the only “strong female character.” LeVine puts women in a wide variety of intellectually powerful and/or financially independent roles, including an aerospace scientist, an entrepreneur/chemist, and an organized crime boss. That being said, I don’t know what Lois was like in the comics or in other adaptations, or whether there were powerful and independent female villains in other versions too. Doesn’t matter, though. This Superman show is the only Superman show, as far as I’m concerned, and Dean Cain is the only Superman!
