Series creators Al Gough and Miles Millar I owe a lot to adolescence. The decision to chronicle this part of the character’s life gave them two mega hits: Smallville and Wednesday. However, the two shows premiered more than 20 years apart. Smallville came to life in a completely different television world. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Gough and Millar talked about the fledgling Superman series and whether they regret it.

During the interview, the duo highlighted that one of the biggest changes separating today’s content from the early 00s is the number of episodes. While there are a few TV shows today that run over 20 episodes in a season, this used to be the norm when Smallville premiere. Thus, by season 5, the series was typically running at 100 episodes, which meant that the season-long and per-episode arcs had to be much more spaced apart. One such arc was the relationship between main character Clark Kent (Tom Welling) and Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk), which famously dragged on - as Millar points out:

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“We were definitely careful and just very conscious of the fact that we wanted to get five seasons, and we ended up with 10 seasons, but we just thought, ‘OK, if we split them apart, what are we going to do? ‘ Again, as the father of the girls, I think the female characters today we would do differently. I don’t think Lana’s agency was there. She could have been a much stronger character and she always felt weak. This is a different era, a different time. So I think we could do that and would definitely like to do better.”

Clark and Lana
Image via Warner Bros.

Gough and Millar think Smallville Wouldn’t happen by today’s standards

As Millar pointed out, the ignorance of female characters’ agency seriously hurt Lana Lang’s arc, as for most of the series, Lana’s approach was to wait for Clarke to be with her and have nothing else to do. At the same time when it came to Lois Lane’s cousins ​​(Erica Durance) and Chloe Sullivan (Allison Mack). Despite the mistakes, Gough celebrates the fact that they got the show they wanted and ignores some of the canonical aspects of Superman mythology - which probably wouldn’t take off today:

“I think there are things in there, if we were back we would probably be a little more adventurous with some of those relationships and get them to certain goals and let them play out. […] I feel like we were very, very lucky to do the show when we did it, because we had to do the show we wanted to do, and to be honest, we didn’t have a committee sitting on top of us telling us we could or we can’t do. I mean, we had Warner traits that didn’t give us certain characters that we wanted, but we had to do the show we wanted to do, and today we wouldn’t be allowed to do that show. There were so many deviations from canon.”

Smallville aired for 10 seasons and produced over 200 episodes. It tells the story of Clark Kent, a teenage boy who learns to use and master his superpowers, long before he becomes Superman. The series featured several notable characters in history, including Jimmy Olsen (Aaron Ashmore), Oliver Queen/Green Arrow (Justin Hartley) and Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum). The series ended in 2011, and today Rosenbaum and Welling host a podcast. Ville’s discussionin which they revisit the series and comment on each episode with former co-stars.