“Smallville”, which returned to the youth of Superman, marked the small screen. In a recent podcast, the show’s creators discuss Warner’s pressures at the time over a very important aspect of the script, which could have harmed the show.
It has now been eleven years since the Smallville series bowed out. Relating, for ten seasons, the birth of Clark Kent, alias Superman, the series created by showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar marked the small screen.
Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum, who played Clark Kent and Lex Luthor in the series, continue to maintain the flame. Last June, they announced the launch of a rewatch podcast of the series, called Talkville.
In the 3rd episode of the podcast, Hothead, the creators of the series are invited to deliver their memories and anecdotes of production. They thus evoke the pressure of the leaders of Warner Bros. Television of the time on a very important screenplay spring: the adoptive parents of Clark Kent, Jonathan and Martha Kent.
In the series, the adoptive and especially terrestrial parents of the future Superman constituted one of the most important aspects in the formation of the character. Farmer, Jonathan (John Schneider) was a caring but firm father, lined with high moral values, very influential on Clark to help him adapt to his abilities, to help him also to make informed and responsible choices. The relationship between the two was very close. In short, caring parents.
This was apparently not to the liking of Warner’s executives, who instead wanted a much more antagonistic relationship between Clark and his parents. “Early on in production, before the airing, we had these meetings with them and some people were like, ‘These parents should be a lot more antagonistic, he [Clark] should hate his parents! That was just another cliché teen drama, and we really struggled with that idea.” says Miles Millar.
The leaders of Warner thus wanted to remain in the movement of the series of the time, like Dawson, That ’70 Show, The Brothers Scott or Newport Beach, which presented characters maintaining conflicting relations with their parents. Give thanks to the showrunners of Smallville to have been able to defend their position.