Smallville
Ten seasons of Clark Kent before the cape — a teenager learning to hide superpowers in small-town Kansas, one kryptonite freak-of-the-week at a time. It was The WB's biggest series debut ever, and its real long game was watching Clark and Lex Luthor's friendship curdle into destiny.
Alfred Gough and Miles Millar developed Smallville under a radical constraint they called "no tights, no flights": a Superman origin told in real time, without the suit, without the flying. The show premiered October 16, 2001, on The WB with Tom Welling as Clark Kent, Kristin Kreuk as his first love Lana Lang, Michael Rosenbaum as Lex Luthor, and Allison Mack as Chloe Sullivan. The pilot drew 8.4 million viewers — The WB's highest-rated series debut — and Remy Zero's "Save Me" wailing over the opening credits became one of the defining TV sounds of the early 2000s.
Early seasons ran on a proven formula: a new kryptonite-mutated "meteor freak" every week, a small-town mystery, and Clark's secret pulling him out of every normal teenage moment. Each freak was another reason he had to be two people at once — the farm kid his friends knew and the guardian they didn't — and the show gradually traded the villain-of-the-week engine for longer mythology arcs as the seasons stacked up.
The long game, though, was always Clark and Lex. Lex Luthor began as a genuine friend — the billionaire's exiled son fascinated by the boy who pulled him from a river — and season by season, his hunger to understand Clark's secret and Clark's compounding deceptions fractured the friendship into something colder, with the audience watching an enmity everyone knew was coming assemble itself in slow motion. The series moved to The CW after the 2006 network merger and ended May 13, 2011, at 10 seasons and 217 episodes — an origin story that took a full decade to put on the cape.
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