Superman & Lois Review

The premise is the reason it works. Rather than another origin, this begins with a couple who have been together for years, two teenage sons and a mortgage, and moves them out of Metropolis to a farm in a declining rural county with a closing mine and an opioid problem. Suddenly the character has something to protect that is not a skyline. Tyler Hoechlin plays Clark as a decent, slightly tired father rather than an icon, and his scenes with Elizabeth Tulloch have the texture of an actual marriage, including the arguments.

The first season is shot with real ambition for its budget, wide and warm and unusually filmic for its network. It does decline. Money was cut season by season, cast members were written out for reasons that were plainly financial, and the teenage subplots about football and anxiety take up time the main story needs. The villains outside the first season are thin, and a late storyline about illness is handled sincerely but slowly. Underseen and better than it had any right to be.