“Is that Kryptonite in your
pocket, or are you happy to see me?”
Lois Lane in Lois and Clark: the New
Adventures of Superman (1993 – 1997)
The
Superman films of Christopher Reeve were a product of the late 1970s and the
1980s, starting in the immediate post-Watergate Age.
However,
the legend was reborn in the Age of Clinton with Lois and Clark: The New
Adventures of Superman, a romantic/comedy/adventure that shifted and
updated the general tone of the franchise, but in a manner that was largely
pleasing to mass audiences (if not always to the long-time Superman
aficionado).
Developed
for TV by Deborah Joy Levine, this series premiered in 1993 -- the same year as
The
X-Files (1993 – 2002) -- and was scheduled by ABC for Sunday nights at
8:00 pm.
Lois
and Clark
competed for audience attention against the successful CBS mystery series Murder
She Wrote, and NBC’s new science fiction epic from Steven Spielberg, SeaQuest
DSV (1993 – 1996). The new Superman series was not a hit with audiences
at first, but it resonated immediately with critics and good word-of-mouth
spread until the series began to smash its weekend competition on a regular
basis.
Writing
for Commonwealth, reviewer Frank
McConnell concluded of Lois and Clark that it is “one of the best things – smart and poignant
– you can watch on the tube,” and noted that the series boasted a “sense of high fun…that can’t be faked.”
At
Entertainment Weekly, Ken Tucker
called Lois and Clark “the most
human hour of programming that Sunday night has to offer.” Time
Magazine preferred SeaQuest DSV but commented
admiringly of Lois and Clark’s “good-humored
verve” and “hip facetiousness.”
This
nineties-era Superman series stars Dean Cain as Clark Kent/Superman and Teri
Hatcher as Lois Lane. The late, great Lane
Smith (formerly of V: The Series) plays Daily Planet
Editor-in-chief Perry White, and the series boasts two incarnations of Jimmy
Olsen: Michael Landes and Justin Whalen. John Shea menaced Metropolis as Lex
Luthor in the first season, and was then seen only sporadically through the ensuing
three years before cancellation.
Over
the span of four years, Bruce Campbell, Jonathan Frakes, Harry Anderson, Roger
Daltrey, Emma Samms, Robert Culp, Drew Carey, Delta Burke, and Bronson Pinchot
all showed up to menace Metropolis.
One
of the most popular villains was Lane Davies’ Tempus, a time traveling nemesis who appeared in three
different stories. The series featured
many familiar superhero tropes, including an episode in which Lois was gifted with
Superman’s powers (“Ultra Woman”) and another in which Superman experienced amnesia, right when he was needed to stop an approaching asteroid, "All Shook Up." The latter episode was a remake of an Adventures of Superman story, "Panic in the Sky."
Lois and Clark also occasionally featured villains from the
comics, like Metallo. However, the series wore
out everyone’s patience, with the Lois and Clark wedding which turned out to be a
sham: Clark ended up marrying a frog-eating clone of Lois instead of the real
thing.
The next season, a story called “Swear
to God, This Time We’re Not Kidding” got the real nuptials out of the way, but
felt like an anti-climax.
The
most exciting episodes of the series were likely those that featured renegade
Kryptonians arriving on Earth and capturing Smallville so Clark would surrender
and take his place as prince of New Krypton.
This multi-part story included the chapters bridging the third and fourth
seasons, “Big Girls Don’t Fly,” “Lord of the Flys” and “Battleground Earth.”
Although a fifth season of Lois and Clark had been promised by
ABC, the network reneged and the series ended with “The Family Hour,” a story
which found Lois and Clark suddenly acquiring a mysterious baby…
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