20 Years Ago This Week: Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993 - 1996)

“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 1993 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…

We had Man of Steel in movie theaters this summer, but in my opinion the very expensive blockbuster movie lacked the heart and humanity of Lois and Clark, which began a four year run twenty years this week.