2002 TV News Archives

Smallville

March 7, 2002: Vancouver Sun "Smallville" Article

The Vancouver Sun newspaper recently published an article about "Smallville". Titled "Super series flying high", the article was written by Alex Strachan and talks about how "Smallville" is becoming the first made-in-B.C. TV show since The X-Files to ignite a celebratory stir among North American critics and fans. Here's an excerpt from the article...

Smallville is set in a Kansas town that advertises itself as "the creamed-corn capital of the world," so you could be forgiven for dismissing it as pure American corn pone, hokum for the post-9/11 era.

Another reason to dismiss Smallville might be its far-fetched plots, which revolve around human cockroaches, genuine seers and anorexics who develop a taste for human flesh. In tonight's episode, burglars with apparent superpowers break into the Luthor mansion, only to be brought down to earth by truth, justice and the American way in the embodiment of 17-year-old high-school senior Clark Kent, conflicted teenager and reluctant superhero-in-training who regards himself (in the first episode, anyway) as a "total loser."

You could dismiss Smallville as just another light-as-a-feather flight of fancy, but that would be a mistake. From an essay in this month's Vanity Fair to a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Smallville is fast becoming the first Lower Mainland-filmed series to register an impact on the mass culture since the heydays of The X-Files.

One reason may be that Smallville has soul; that alone makes it a rarity in prime-time television. Aside from Gilmore Girls and The West Wing (when it isn't mawkish) or Six Feet Under (when it isn't morbid) soul is in short supply on TV. Like Gilmore Girls, the show Smallville most resembles -- in tone, if not in substance -- Smallville weaves its tales of adolescent angst and life longings with the grace and dignity of a feature film. In most TV shows directed at a teenage audience, parents and other adult authority figures are depicted as morons, cardboard caricatures to be ignored or ridiculed. Smallville's parent figures are layered, deeply drawn characters, well-meaning and steadfastly moral, but wracked with doubts and uncertainties.

Read the complete article at the Vancouver Sun website.



2002 Television News

Listed below are all the Television News items archived for 2002 organized into 4 categories:

“Smallville” News:

“Justice League” and “Superman” Animated Series News: “Lois & Clark” News: Other Superman Related Television News:

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