SUPERGIRL Comic-Con Panel and First Episode Impressions
DC Entertainment really brought the fire this year with their Warner Bros. Television Entertainment panel at Comic-Con. We saw a lot of new information for all of DC's TV series: Arrow, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, Gotham, and Supergirl. While the panels for the other DC shows touched more on the story and development, the Supergirl portion focused a lot on star Melissa Benoist, and the character of Kara Danvers/Supergirl.
There was a lot of talk particularly from producer Ali Adler about Kara NOT being Superman. They mentioned several times that while Kara has the same powers as her cousin Clark, they are vastly different characters. There was little information about the supporting cast, with the exception of James Olsen (the distinction of him not being called Jimmy is made very apparent), played by Mehcad Brooks. In this series, James will play a mentor/love interest to Kara, and serve as her link to Superman.
The most notable thing about the Supergirl panel was the showing of the entire pilot episode. Going into this I was very skeptical: Supergirl is a small intellectual property that most people have no investment in, so how could they give this enough appeal? But after listening to the cast & crew talk about the show and their passion for it, I was fired up to see the pilot.
My hopes were promptly, and utterly, destroyed.
Half of the episode is written like a romantic comedy, with all the awful, cringe-worthy tropes, and cliches that come along with that. The other half of the episode felt like the writers just wanted to cram every trope, from lines about women, particularly as heroes, to talking about family, and love and everything else you can imagine, into 20 minutes of physically painful to watch television. There were a few scenes of minor redemption. Melissa Benoist brings a lot of great emotion to the table, which really comes across beautifully when it's not smothered by horribly cliched writing. Every character fits nicely into a classic archetype of TV sitcoms, and the whole things feels like a horrible mix of Friends, and Buffy — without the good parts of those series. It feels like this show was written by a mix of 12-year-old girls and 9-year-old boys.
The few minutes of action we saw were decent, and the effects look great, particularly her flying. But the entire time I couldn't help but be distracted by the absolutely god-awful writing. The show has potential, they've set it up in an interesting way, with her main goal being hunting down a mass of alien super-criminals her mother put away in a Kryptonian prison. If the writers can pull their collective heads out of their pudding cups, we may actually get a series worthy of being part of DC's strong TV programming. If not, this series will need to be buried so deep not even Superman himself can find it.