There is something special about Superman and Lois Season 1, review

There is something special about Superman and Lois Season 1

While making people wait for quite some time, Superman and Lois Season 1 lit up the sultry summer evenings of Italia 1 (but you can recover all the episodes thanks to Mediaset Infinity), concluding its run last night with the last three episodes. A television version of the Man of Steel (recovered our article Superman: the story of the Man of Steel on TV) that, starting from absolutely unpublished premises, and passing through some very spot-on revelations while the plots were unraveled, returned to the public a new Superman yet extremely familiar (not an adjective chosen at random) and capable of being relevant on several levels also thanks to this television formula certainly far from perfection but fascinating and courageous.



Superman & Lois Italia 1

Superman and Lois Season 1: return to Smallville…

After the Daily Planet is absorbed by a multinational, Clark Kent and Lois Lane they decide to move to the quieter Smallville or the town where he grew up. The occasion is not the happiest, Martha, Clark's mother has recently died and the decision to move is not taken very well by Jonathan and Jordan, the two teenage children of the couple who do not yet know the secret of their father: Clark is in reality Superman.| ); }
Superman and Lois, however, must also manage the emergencies of Clark and Lois, parents of two teenagers. Jonathan and Jordan, with a diametrically opposite character, are managing the transition from the big city to the province in a diametrically opposite way and not without some crisis including the disturbing presence, at least for Jonathan, of Sarah, the daughter of Lana Lang, Clark's first love.

As the threat of the mysterious stranger and Morgan Edge's agenda seem to increasingly converge inexplicably, with the onset of powers in Jonathan, Clark and Lois decide to let their children know about Clark's secret. When the mysterious stranger reveals his identity, Morgan Edge no longer needs to conceal his true nature by dramatically revealing his plan of catastrophic proportions surprisingly linked to the very origins of Superman.

… back to the (real) world

Superman and Lois Season 1 responds, with its far from perfect mix, it is good to reiterate it, to one of the oldest questions that have surrounded the character practically always: how can Superman be still relevant ? what kind of stories can be told for an omnipotent character, just to use the most direct adjective possible? An answer is offered by the series that overturns some classic stylistic features to re-read them in a post-modern key.

In this sense, the first "trip" to the Superman canon is the one linked to Jonathan and Jordan which leads to the extreme consequences an experiment implemented with moderate success (at least initially) in comics: Clark Kent is no longer just the awkward reporter for the Daily Planet, he is a father of a family and two teenagers too. Another paradigm shift: Smallville is no longer Donner's Rockwellian province or the glossy one of the homonymous TV series but a suffering town that reflects the conditions of American provincial life.

Apparently these are two purely narrative stratagems, typical of a certain television series, which however during the episodes of this first season take very specific contours. Superman and Lois in this sense is to all intents and purposes a family drama that sees Superman and Clark interact in equal measure, and often in similar situations, in certain dynamics (Clark and Lois, parents-children and so on) typical of the genre they move away from. immediately the series with the most distinctly soap opera contexts that has always been creeping into the Arrowverse.




This Superman fights first of all a daily battle in the sense that it is shared with thousands of other people: he moves in that very uncertain territory that is parenting, he faces a world where justice and the truth are constantly relativized and made unstable by difficult socio-economic conditions. He is gripped by doubts, tensions and often even fears he is human, very human, yet he does not give up either a smile or trust in others and in the good. The series thus seeks an important approach to superhero matter: to tell something else / reality through his lens. A courageous choice.

Read also: 5 reasons to watch Superman & Lois

Superman and Lois Season 1: between action and comics with an eye to form

With a narrative structure that is then based to the family drama and the shadow of the Arrowverse from which to get away Superman and Lois Season 1 decides to sink the blow by offering not only a good dose of action but also by inserting a series of easter-eggs related to the truly sensational character. It is all preparatory to the real intentions of showrunners and screenwriters who do not slavishly adapt but plunder one of Superman's most famous comic stories, The Death of Superman, revisiting two fundamental characters of that saga.

Read also: Superman - the essential comics Certainly the adaptation may not meet the favor of a certain type of public, especially if readers of comics, but there is no doubt that it works very well in television terms and even surprises as regards the character of the Stranger, played by an intended Wolé Parks, who turns out to be John Henry Irons or the hero Steel but coming from a parallel reality, one in which Superman has gone mad. A choice that shows the great sensitivity in the writing phase in seeking even more recent references to the stories starring the Man of Steel, just see Injustice or once again the Zack Snyder's Justice League.

Keeping in mind that the production of the series does not have a stellar budget like that of the most recent productions for streaming, the producers and directors adopt some interesting tricks to make the visual experience as "cinematic" as possible below. different points of view. The first is in the choice of the aspect ratio of the action scenes which becomes a 2.2: 1 widescreen compared to the classic 1.78: 1 of the TV series. This allows you to amplify the range of the frame, playing on the classic stop-motion without having to resort to camera games, which have become a real trademark for example in Arrow.



Another interesting aspect is related to photography. While not giving up on simple exposures with very "glossy" palettes, the use of some Panavision B-series anamorphic lenses from the 1960s enhance the saturation of the more bleak tones typical of the Kansas countryside (in reality it is British Columbia in Canada ) giving Smallville an air of suspension in time and being able to linger very often on long and very long shots of landscapes (along the lines of the modern American neo-realistic style) which thus replace the cloying soap opera-style filler fields and counterfields used in the Arrowverse.