Superman & Lois Was the Perfect Show For Its Moment

Some thoughts on the end of the broadcast TV superhero era

Tyler Hoechlin takes off in an episode of Superman & Lois.

Tonight will see the final episode of Superman & Lois, a show I have been covering since…well, since before it was a show, as is so common with comic book properties. The show will be sorely missed.

Tyler Hoechlin and Bitsie Tulloch first appeared as Superman and Lois Lane in shows tied to The CW’s Arrowverse — a shared universe of superhero shows that started with 2011’s Arrow but a tradition that goes back farther than that.

Before Arrow, The CW had both Birds of Prey — a little-remembered show about a trio of women in leather who fought crime in Gotham City — and Smallville, the long-running Superman origin show.

Stepping into the role of the Arrowverse’s Superman was never going to be easy, because people loved Smallville star Tom Welling so much, but Hoechlin pulled it off, and has become widely viewed as one of the all-time best Superman actors during his decade wearing the cape.

First appearing in the second season of Supergirl, Hoechlin’s Clark Kent only periodically showed up. During the 2018 Elseworlds crossover event, the audience got to meet Hoechlin’s Lois (Tulloch), who was just as strong in her role as Hoechlin was in his. A year later, they both appeared in Crisis on Infinite Earths — even sharing a scene with Welling’s Clark Kent — and a year after that, they had their own show in development.

I haven’t seen the series finale yet — while I was on the screener list for the rest of the season, the finale got special treatment for obvious reasons, and since I don’t currently have a day job, I didn’t make the cut. But the show’s final season has been its most consistently excellent since its first, and by all indications it’s going out strong. That’s likely a relief for fans who watched some of the Arrowverse shows limp across the finish line (or, in the case of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, end on a cliffhanger).

A strong final season is generally a good sign that a TV show hasn’t yet hit its expiration date, and that it has been operating at or near the peak of its quality for most of its run. Certainly, that’s the case with Superman & Lois, which has become one of the most beloved pieces of Superman-related media in years.

The show, which establishes a literal “Superman family,” features a middle-aged, married Superman and Lois, who have moved to Smallville to raise their twin sons after one of them starts to develop super-powers.

The show’s lore is heavily steeped in the “Triangle Era” of Superman — basically, the 1990s — which is named for the small triangles (later pentagrams reminiscent of Superman’s crest) on the cover, which gave audiences the reading order of the various ongoing Superman books.*

The Triangle Era is, for my money, where you can find the best Superman comics of my lifetime. It was certainly a fertile era for new creations and live-action-friendly reinventions of old characters. Some of those characters, such as The Eradicator and Steel, played important roles in Superman & Lois. The look of Metropolis, too, drew inspiration from that era, as did Clark’s personality.

That’s an important one, so let’s dig into it a little bit.

Following DC’s line-wide event/reboot Crisis on Infinite Earths in the mid-1980s, writer/artist John Byrne was tapped to reinvent Superman for a modern audience. The Silver and Bronze Age stories of the character had really embraced camp and fantasy, and the publisher wanted a version of Superman that was less fantasy and more science-fiction.

An important decision Byrne made was to significantly reduce the scope of Superman’s powers. While in the 1970s, Superman could outwit any villain using his super-brain and could literally move planets around if they were inconveniencing him, Byrne’s Superman (first introduced in the miniseries The Man of Steel was significantly less godlike. The character’s paternalistic personality was also toned down a bit, emphasizing his relationship with Lois Lane and treating Clark more like a human than a “strange visitor.” In one memorable scene from The Man of Steel, which was referenced often during the Triangle Era, Clark nearly breaks down while talking to his father about using his powers in public for the first time. He had done so to save someone’s life, but after it was done, everyone around him was clawing at him, begging him for something.

“They all want a piece of me, Pa,” Clark says, his face hidden in shadows and his body language looking defeated. It’s then that Clark and his father come up with the idea of the Superman identity and costume.

That identity, and the toll it takes on Clark and everyone else in his life, was a key component of the final season of Superman & Lois. In it, he had to deal with the fact that Lex Luthor had figured out his secret, and that after decades in the cape, there was no longer any real benefit to keeping the secret.

The secret got out, in large part, because of Superman’s death. For those paying attention at home, that took place in Superman #75, which is cited in the footnotes below. Superman’s death at the hands of Doomsday is easily the most famous Superman comic book story of the last 40 years, and has been adapted numerous times already, in the animated movies Superman: Doomsday (2007) and The Death of Superman (2018) and the live-action film Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2015). Even when Superman media doesn’t directly adapt the Death of Superman storyline, Doomsday has become a staple of the mythology outside comics, appearing in Justice League Unlimited, Smallville, and Krypton.

In the comics, The Death of Superman was the perfect culmination of about a half-dozen years of post-Crisis storytelling, bringing together various threads and introducing characters and concepts that riffed on most of the biggest stories that had taken place in the Superman titles to that point. One of the characters introduced, John Henry Irons, is arguably the best new character introduced by DC since 1990. In Superman & Lois, Irons was introduced as “Captain Luthor,” a refugee from the multiverse, but it was soon revealed that he was in fact someone else using a shipboard AI that just believed him to be Lex Luthor.

“[When it was] Captain Luthor, it was very much coming from a place of it being a redemption story of it being like, we’re going to understand why he’s acting the way he is and what’s happened on this other Earth, and all of that,” Jai Jamison, a staff writer on Superman & Lois, told me in 2021. “But then, Adam Mallinger, our writers’ assistant, pitched, ‘What if we make him John Henry?’ And that was the thing that just was like, yes. And it’s funny because Adam sent an email to Todd, and then he kind of sidebarred to me, ‘I think you’re going to like this pitch.’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I do like this pitch a lot.’ I told them, I spent a lot of time in my head on John Henry’s Earth. I just came in with a ton of ideas, like too many ideas for Todd. Stuff that we will never see, but I did all of his backstory, all of what happened. We’ll see some of it, but I gave him way too much material. But it was just such a blast, and such an amazing, surreal, awesome responsibility to be able to introduce this character that so many people love, myself included, into the Arrowverse.”

We’ll ignore for the moment the fact that even Jamison believed Superman & Lois was “in the Arrowverse” at that point in time.

In addition to John Henry Irons, who became Superman’s most trusted ally over the course of the series, the show heavily featured a version of The Eradicator, a Kryptonian AI-turned-supervillain-turned antihero that was first introduced during Superman’s exile in space in 1989. That character is one who has become a fan-favorite (and often vascillates between good and bad depending on the needs of the story), so it makes sense to bring him aboard. In fact, of the four significant characters introduced in the wake of Superman’s death in the comics, only one — Hank Henshaw, the Cyborg Superman — never made it to live action during the last 20 years of nonstop superhero action.

Superman & Lois wasn’t just the right show for the moment because it was a good show — although it was! — but it was the right show for the moment because it represented something that the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its cracked mirror image the DC Extended Universe never really did: the unvarnished joy of living in a world where superheroes exist.

It’s been decades now since cynicism and deconstruction started creeping into American superhero comics. Watchmen, consistently suggested to everyone on Earth as the pinnacle of superhero art, has bred disdain for conventional superhero narratives into a big chunk of the comics-reading audience, and those notions have crystallized into the entire point of Prime Video’s massively-successful adaptation of WildStorm/Dynamite’s acclaimed comic book The Boys.

Superman & Lois is grounded in a way that a campy show like Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman never was, but it has never been as cynical as The Boys or Watchmen — or even Arrow could be at times. The show allows Superman to be Superman, leaning on Hoechlin’s excellent performance and the family dynamic that’s key to the show’s success to make the audience believe some of the sillier elements of the character’s lore.

In 1978, Christopher Reeve and Richard Donner promised the world “you’ll believe a man can fly.” It was mostly a commentary on the film’s groundbreaking visual effects. Almost 50 years later, Hoechlin, Tulloch, and company have us believing not just that Clark can fly, but in the unvarnished hope that he represents.

I’ll have a lot more to say about Superman this week. For now, I just want to say “thank you” to the team behind Superman & Lois, who brought my personal favorite live-action Superman to life for the last few years.

*For example, you could have a book with the cover date 1993-2, which would indicate that of the four Superman comics to be released with a January 1993 cover date, that book (in this example, Superman #75 by Dan Jurgens and Brett Breeding, with colors by Glenn Whitmore and letters by John Constanza) should be read second. The numbering would continue all year long, with most years ending with something along the lines of triangle number “1994-48.”