Al Gough & Miles Millar, “Wednesday” creators, on “Smallville”

• Al Gough and Miles Millar, the creators of Young Superman, discuss their regrets from the series.
• The lack of respect for the agency of female characters harmed Lana Lang’s storyline.
• With more than 200 episodes, Smallville ran for ten seasons.

Al Gough and Miles Millar, the creators of the series, owe a lot to growing up. They have two huge successes as a result of their decision to document that period of a character’s life: Smallville and Wednesday.

However, these two shows debuted more than 20 years apart from one another, and Smallville debuted in a totally distinct television landscape. Gough and Millar discussed the Young Superman series and any regrets they may have had in an interview.

The two emphasized during the conversation that one of the main differences between today’s material and the early aughts is the number of episodes. While a few series now produce 20 or more episodes every season, when Smallville first aired, that was the standard.

So, by Season 5, a typical television series would have 100 episodes, necessitating much greater intervals between season-long and series-long arcs. One of those storylines was the notably drawn-out romance between the protagonist character Clark Kent (Tom Welling) and Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk). As Millar emphasises:

“We were definitely cautious and just very conscious of the fact we wanted to get to five seasons, and we ended up at 10 seasons, but we’re just like, ‘OK, if we split them apart, what are we gonna do?’ Again, as the father of girls, I think the female characters we would do differently today. I think Lana, her agency was not there. She could have been a much stronger character, and she always felt put in positions of weakness. It’s a different era, a different time. So, that’s something I think we could have done and would definitely look at to do better.”

As Millar pointed out, the lack of respect for the agency of female characters badly harmed Lana Lang’s storyline since throughout the majority of the series, Lana was viewed as someone who was waiting for Clark to be with her and didn’t have many other interests.

In addition, the show defied some stereotypes of female characters when it came to Lois Lane (Erica Durance) and Chloe Sullivan, cousins (Allison Mack).

Despite the errors, Gough praises the fact that they were able to produce the show they desired while ignoring several canonical elements of the Superman story that probably wouldn’t fly in the modern world:

“I think there are things there, if we went back, we probably would be a little more adventurous with some of those relationships and bring them to certain heads and let them play out. […] I feel like we were very, very fortunate to do the show when we did it because we got to make the show we wanted to make, and frankly, there was no committee sitting over us telling us what we could or couldn’t do. I mean, we had Warner’s features, who wouldn’t give us certain characters that we wanted, but we got to make the show we wanted to make which we wouldn’t be allowed to make that show today. There were so many deviations from the canon.”

With more than 200 episodes, Smallville ran for ten seasons. Long before he became Superman, it portrayed the tale of Clark Kent as a young man learning to control and use his talents.

Throughout the series, a number of well-known figures appeared in the plot, including Lex Luthor, Oliver Queen/Green Arrow, Jimmy Olsen (Aaron Ashmore), and Oliver Queen (Michael Rosenbaum).

The show’s run ended in 2011, and now Rosenbaum and Welling are the hosts of the podcast Talk Ville, where they replay the episodes and discuss them with their former co-stars.

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