Smallville-Big Ratings (Smallville)

Member Name: creekfan

Product:	Smallville
Date:	31/03/02 (414 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Entertaining and original, Great premise, Kristen Kreuk as Lana Lang - Yum Yum

Disadvantages: Idiotic producers - why the hell would Metropolis be in Kansas?

Smallville, or as channel 4 like to call it Superman: the Early years, has turned out to be one of the successes of channel four over the past few months, pulling in well over 3 million viewers per episode.

Smallville is set 12 years after baby Kal-El comes to Earth in a spaceship, he becomes known as Clark Kent after he is adopted by the Kent family - Jonathon and Martha, unaware of his true origins and struggling with his differences from other people. But the nearby town where his ship landed, Smallville (in Kansas), and the lives of its residents, have been altered by the meteor storm that accompanied his arrival. Clark is now in high school, struggling to protect his identity but also trying to rid himself of his geeky persona and trying to deal with his infatuation for his classmate Lana Lang. In the first episode we see him save Lex Luthor,a budding entrepreneur who we all know is the evil guy in the grown up version of Superman, from his car, which leads to Lex puzzling over video footage of the dramatic rescue in future episodes. We are also introduced to his friends Chloe Sullivan (she fancies Clark), a journalist for the school magazine and investigator of all that is weird in Smallville, Pete Ross a sort of character whose just always there and has some involvement with most storylines, Lana Lang (whose parents died in the Meteor shower) who is dating Whitney Fordman (the jock type character) - much to Clark's dismay and Lex Luther who 'appears' to be one of Clark's closest friends.

Smallville could be dismissed as a Dawson's Creek/Buffy/Roswell clone which I guess it is sort of, but in all the good ways. It combines the best elements of each of the shows' to its advantage - It has the witty and sometimes serious script and likeable characters of Dawson's Creek, the heroin figure and great storylines of Buffy and
Sci-fi aspects/truly weird goings on of Roswell. I have to say though that they are
one day going to run out of storylines involving strange things that have happened in town since the meteor so should diversify and perhaps allow us a bigger insight into each characters' life, perhaps they could do a groundhog day/GO style episode where we see the day from every characters point of view - it worked well in Dawson's Creek. I guess the episodes are all a bit predictable, after the teaser at the beginning it is quite easy to guess what the basic goings on in the show will be.

The casting in this show is great, whoever chose Annette O tool as Clark's mother and John Schneider as Clark's father deserve a medal. In fact all of the actors were well chosen - Tom Welling is great as Clark (looks just like a younger version of Christopher Reeve) and EVEN Kelly Brook is okay as on/off girlfriend/business associate of Lex Luther.

Quite an odd aspect of the show however is the many references to the city of metropolis as being a big city just a few towns away - Clark and Lana can even see it from on top of a windmill - which is unusual because why on earth would the city of Metropolis be in peaceful and quaint little Kansas?

Overall Smallville was a great premise and merit due to Channel 4 for picking it up. The shows only flaws being the idiot who couldn't decide where to put Metropolis and eventually decided on it being in...Kansas and the slow pace of writing. And although the song in the opening credits is catchy - it's not quite how I imagined the theme tune to be...

MORE TO COME...

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