The venerable Superman mythos gets a 21st-century
updating in this imaginative and engaging television series from the
WB Network, and series fans can celebrate the ratings success of
Smallville with a six-disc set that compiles its entire first
season. The deluxe package offers a chance to revisit the origins of
the characters and their numerous plotlines, as well as view deleted
scenes and other bonus features.
The premise of Smallville--Superman as a teenager--takes
up just a few pages in Superman's very first comic book appearance
(in Action Comics back in 1938), but series producers Alfred
Gough and Miles Millar flesh out that period by portraying young
Clark Kent (Tom Welling) not as the noble Superman-in-waiting, but
as an average teen with some not-so-ordinary supernatural powers,
including incredible strength and heat vision (Clark hasn't lifted
up, up, and away as of yet). Clark's desire to fit in with his peers
and make sense of his extraordinary abilities ground him in very
realistic and identifiable terms for the series' primarily under-25
audience, as does his appealing and tentative romance with Kristen
Kreuk as Clark's dreamgirl Lana Lang. But Smallville also
strikes gold when it takes a turn towards more comic book territory,
as evidenced by the parade of shape-shifting killers and other
outlandish antagonists (many generated, in one of the series' most
ingenious notions, by the same devastating meteor shower that
brought the infant Clark to Earth) that Clark must harness his
powers to face and defeat. Gough and Millar, along with their
capable cast (which includes Michael Rosenbaum as a young and
already bald-pated Lex Luthor, and Annette O'Toole and John
Schneider as the Kents) manage to pull off the precarious high-wire
act of combining science fiction with coming-of-age drama to create
this highly watchable program.
Smallville: The Complete First Season offers a very
complete and attractive DVD package that is rounded out by some
highly desirable extras for longtime series fans. The six-disc set
offers all 21 episodes of the first season, including the pilot, in
widescreen anamorphic format; Gough and Millar are featured on the
set's sole commentary track, which appears on the pilot episode.
Viewers can also access a number of deleted scenes from various
episodes as well as view original pre-production storyboards and WB
promotional spots. An interactive "tour" of Smallville rounds out
the extras, but DVD-ROM owners can use the discs to access more
features via the Smallville web site. --Paul Gaita
