SMALLVILLE Creators Reveal WB Originally Wanted Clark to Hate His Adoptive Parents
I’m currently in the middle of rewatching Smallville for the first time since it originally aired, and I’m also listening to Talkville, a Smallville rewatch podcast that is hosted by Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum. Each episode of the podcast features the former Smallville stars talking about an episode of the classic series. I’m enjoying it, and I’m also loving the experience of watching Smallville again!
One of the things that I love about Smallville is the beautiful relationship that Clark had with his adoptive parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent. That relationship is key to the show and the evolution of Clark over the course of the series. Well, it turns out at the executive over at Warner Bros. had a different idea for Clark and his parents that creators Miles Millar and Alfred Gough found themselves fighting against.
The studio wanted to present Jon and Martha Kent as unlikable parents, and they wanted Clark to hate them! This is such a terrible idea! Millar recently shared on the podcast:
"In the early days before we aired, we had all this like backroom politics with the network and people saying, 'You know those parents should be like much more antagonistic and he should hate the parents. And it's just much more of a cliché teen drama kind of thing. And we really fought against that."
What an awful creative choice. It’s a good thing that Millar and Gough won in the end and got to present Jon and Martha in a positive light. Now, the relationship between Clark and his parents certainly wasn’t perfect. It had its bumps in the road, but what family doesn’t have that? It’s a good thing that everything worked out in the end with Jon and Martha and there were presented in a way that the fans love and admire.
What are your thoughts on what the network executives originally wanted?