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I don't know how many Smallville fans are still on LJ, but I thought that this interview with Al and Miles was fairly interesting:
Q: Smallville stirred up a lot of controversy with hardcore comic book fans devoted to the original. How did you guys deal with that?
AG: Like all writers — we tried to avoid it as much as possible! We stopped reading Ain’t it Cool News where we were being burned in effigy everyday, and didn’t go to the San Diego Comic-Con until Season 2.
MM: Listening to fan boys is tiring, frustrating and ultimately futile. Smallville began at the dawn of the fan-forum era — we used to scan the posts to get a sense of the general feeling, but that’s it. If we did course-correct a storyline it would be because the fans’ sentiment mirrored our own. The truth is the so-called “hardcore fans” will find fault with anything and everything. We had no interest in following the established mythology of the D.C. universe or aligning our timeline with theirs.
Q: What was the most controversial?
AG: Making Lex and Clark friends. That was a radical idea at the time, as well as casting an African American actor to play Pete Ross and a Eurasian actress to play Lana Lang. You would not believe how much flak we caught for those choices from the internet peanut gallery.
MM: Again, probably the meteor shower because it led to accusations that we over-relied on the “freak of the week” formula. We had a super-powered, crime-fighting teenager — we figured he had to battle someone every week. It’s not like sleepy Smallville was a hot bed of crime. It wouldn’t exactly be great drama if Clark was forced to use his awesome abilities to solve the case of the missing library book. I have zero regrets about that.
Q: Looking back, is there anywhere you wish you’d taken the characters of Smallville?
AG: I wish we had a better trajectory for Lana Lang. That was probably a three-season love story that lasted six seasons.
MM: It’s so torturous and slow. Ultimately, it damaged Lana in the audience’s mind. Because Clark refused to tell her the truth about his identity, he was constantly forced to lie to her. Although justified, Lana’s response to his behavior made her seem cold and unsympathetic — even though from her POV, Clark was a sneaky, bold-faced liar.
Miles also mentions that We also almost succeeded in bringing Aquaman to the small screen but were thwarted when the WB got swallowed by UPN and became the CW. The atmosphere at the new network was very hostile to Smallville and they were not open to doing another comic book series. It was all about Gossip Girl — looking back, it’s kind of amazing we survived at all.
Q: Smallville stirred up a lot of controversy with hardcore comic book fans devoted to the original. How did you guys deal with that?
AG: Like all writers — we tried to avoid it as much as possible! We stopped reading Ain’t it Cool News where we were being burned in effigy everyday, and didn’t go to the San Diego Comic-Con until Season 2.
MM: Listening to fan boys is tiring, frustrating and ultimately futile. Smallville began at the dawn of the fan-forum era — we used to scan the posts to get a sense of the general feeling, but that’s it. If we did course-correct a storyline it would be because the fans’ sentiment mirrored our own. The truth is the so-called “hardcore fans” will find fault with anything and everything. We had no interest in following the established mythology of the D.C. universe or aligning our timeline with theirs.
Q: What was the most controversial?
AG: Making Lex and Clark friends. That was a radical idea at the time, as well as casting an African American actor to play Pete Ross and a Eurasian actress to play Lana Lang. You would not believe how much flak we caught for those choices from the internet peanut gallery.
MM: Again, probably the meteor shower because it led to accusations that we over-relied on the “freak of the week” formula. We had a super-powered, crime-fighting teenager — we figured he had to battle someone every week. It’s not like sleepy Smallville was a hot bed of crime. It wouldn’t exactly be great drama if Clark was forced to use his awesome abilities to solve the case of the missing library book. I have zero regrets about that.
Q: Looking back, is there anywhere you wish you’d taken the characters of Smallville?
AG: I wish we had a better trajectory for Lana Lang. That was probably a three-season love story that lasted six seasons.
MM: It’s so torturous and slow. Ultimately, it damaged Lana in the audience’s mind. Because Clark refused to tell her the truth about his identity, he was constantly forced to lie to her. Although justified, Lana’s response to his behavior made her seem cold and unsympathetic — even though from her POV, Clark was a sneaky, bold-faced liar.
Miles also mentions that We also almost succeeded in bringing Aquaman to the small screen but were thwarted when the WB got swallowed by UPN and became the CW. The atmosphere at the new network was very hostile to Smallville and they were not open to doing another comic book series. It was all about Gossip Girl — looking back, it’s kind of amazing we survived at all.
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(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-05 07:26 pm (UTC)AG: I wish we had a better trajectory for Lana Lang. That was probably a three-season love story that lasted six seasons.
MM: It’s so torturous and slow. Ultimately, it damaged Lana in the audience’s mind. Because Clark refused to tell her the truth about his identity, he was constantly forced to lie to her. Although justified, Lana’s response to his behavior made her seem cold and unsympathetic — even though from her POV, Clark was a sneaky, bold-faced liar.
OMG This!! I grew to hate LL because they couldn't figure out how to write her! I felt like there was no solid story for her and I definitely grew to resent her ...
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-05 08:57 pm (UTC)IMO they did do a better job of writing her from around season 5, but in the high school years it was just ridiculous how they set her up as one of the three leads, yet everytime they tried to give her a separate storyline (Henry Small being her father, suddenly going to Paris to study art) it always seemed so half-assed and badly thought-out. Even there Al is just talking about Lana in relation to the love story and how long that should have lasted, instead of what didn't work about Lana's character in her own right
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 02:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 10:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-05 09:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-05 09:31 pm (UTC)But what the writers seemed to want the audience to take on face value about her character was always so messy and badly thought out IMO, it felt like they had no discernible character there, they just had a vague idea about writing her as pretty and popular on the surface/tragic underneath
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 12:29 am (UTC)If they'd allowed Kristin to play a real girl and not their fantasy fap-princess, both KK and the audience would have been much happier.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 12:42 am (UTC)smallville
Date: 2014-05-06 04:24 am (UTC)It was a fun show, though, and it got me into fandom, and it gave me a few years with a great group of friends where we had potlucks and watched the show and laughed and wrote fic. It was awesome, and because of that, Smallville will always have a special place in my heart - even when it was stupid.
Re: smallville
Date: 2014-05-06 10:41 am (UTC)I also started watching originally to see what would tear Clark and Lex apart, so it was a big disappointment when it came across as anti-climatic as it did in the season 3 finale when they were already fighting every week anyway, they never did become as close friends as I had been expecting
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 06:05 am (UTC)And yes, I hate what they kept doing with Lana. Its like no one on the show ever paid any attention to the cumulative effect on all the interactions between the characters. Each episode could be fine enough on its own, but made no sense in the context of the series as a whole. (I'm specifically thinking Lexana S6 here with the whole baby fiasco but it holds for just about every other pairing too).
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 10:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 06:14 am (UTC)I get that a lot of men in the industry fixate on stories where beautiful, desirable women do nothing BUT orbit their hero like Mercury orbits the Sun but there was way too much self-indulgence involved.
I am so glad they didn't get Wonder Woman.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 10:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 12:18 pm (UTC)Meh.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 12:30 pm (UTC)I started liking Lana's character a lot more in season 5 actually when she was looking into the ship with Lex, it seemed like late season 5 and early season 6 were setting up Lana to become a darker character who believed that Level 33.1 had its uses for keeping track of the meteor infected (something that would have been consistent with her past attitudes after being stalked by them so much). Instead she suddenly became all about Clark again around the time of Hydro, and by season 7 her characterisation was all over the place. One minute she is holding Lionel prisoner and seeming to be about to go off the rails, the next she's back at the farm with Clark and the writers are giving interviews about how much good she was doing with the Isis foundation and how justified she was to go after Lionel and Lex. I mean yeah I'm not saying that she didn't have very good justifications for what she was doing, but it was still some pretty messed-up stuff that the writers were just brushing under the rug with ~Lana had every right to fight back~, the kind of stuff that they would have taken seriously if it was Lex driven to hold Lionel hostage. And then don't even get me started on her being in the suit and being the one to talk the future Superman down from killing by season 8.
The writing was just all over the map, and it's a shame because if they had followed through on what they were starting to set up in season 5 it would have been a lot more consistent than the writers never seeming able to decide if they wanted to write her as allied with Clark or Lex this week
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 10:46 pm (UTC)It was pretty clear that SPN was suffering from the same issues, and Veronica Mars did as well around this time. Yet Smallville and other genre shows were the tentpoles for the network -- finally they tried to blend the two ideas with Vampire Diaries andstarted getting a more solid schedule.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 10:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-09 02:37 am (UTC)There's a smarminess about those two in that interview (went and read the whole thing), as if Superman fans only didn't enjoy things because they were different from the source material. That's not true. Some of the changes they made went over big. Lionel, for one, was loved across the board until they sainted him. Those criticisms weren't a bunch of fanboys and girls being butthurt aout them making changes. It was that they'd set up an interesting change or dynamic and then pay it off in the laziest way. Case in point - Clark and Lex. Their enmity at the end could have been about so many things, but it just had to be about a love triangle. And that love triangle could have happened without strangling the momentum of the show.
I don't know. I feel like I want to write a point-by-point rebuttal to these guys. Maybe I'll take it over to my LJ and do it. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-09 10:09 am (UTC)Clex were definitely the biggest disappointment to me, I usually love those stories of friendships tragically torn apart so that they end up hating each other, but urgh the way that SV did it I just didn't end up feeling all that heartbroken. It seemed like from season 2 onwards they were always fighting and their friendship only consisted of asking for favours
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-09 04:31 pm (UTC)And the biggest problem with Pete was how badly they used his character after season 2 before putting him on a bus, never to be spoken of again till they have him come back to pimp gum. And Lana... well, it's all been said above. Even KK is said to have been really dissatisfied.
I think I ended up having more sympathy for Lex than Clark by season 7, the way he'd spent time up till then being asked for favors and then trash talked. Obviously, he was doing horrible things, but he treated Clark on an interpersonal level, a bit better than Clark treated him.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-09 06:03 pm (UTC)Maybe there were those comments out there. I didn't see them over at TWoP, where I spent my time, but that wasn't the majority of complaints at all.
I hang out on TwoP, Livejournal, and Kryptonsite, and I never saw any comments on Pete being black at all, A&M even said themselves at the time that the most common complaint was that fans wanted more Pete and for the writers to find something to do with him, and then they pointed out that fans hated the Velocity episode which thus proved that fans just don't care about Pete supposedly. (Er and maybe the writing of that episode just sucked!) And I came across the occasional comment from fandom about Lana being portrayed as white when the actress was clearly Asian (i.e an old white woman playing older Lana in Hereafter, Lana's parents and then Henry Small all being portrayed as Caucasian), but I still never saw it being a really huge issue for fandom that an Asian actress was cast, it was usually more jokes or irritation about how A&M were trying to whitewash the actresses true race.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-15 03:57 pm (UTC)Like fan girls don't exist?
["casting an African American actor to play Pete Ross"]
They're so proud of themselves for this but actually the casting was a classic case of anti-black racism. They cast a black actor who looked like an oversized baby and looked pathetic next to Tom Welling's Clark, as if to say that white men are more masculine than black ones. This is a common phenomenon. Look at the casting of a bland, gentle-looking black actor to be the tough street vampire hunter (Gunn) alongside David Boreanaz's boxer-like hulking Angel. Again there, it is as if the show makers were making an effort to make the black man look un-masculine next to the white one. There is a white neurosis about black masculinity and this often results in white show makers picking black men whose level of masculinity they're not threatened by.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-15 10:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-17 06:30 am (UTC)I really miss Smallville and it will always have a special place in my heart. I was actually thinking the other day that I needed to sit down and re-watch the whole series from beginning to end. I remember watching the pilot the night it aired, thinking this was going to be a pretty good show. Lex, was actually the reason that I tuned in, and then I soon discovered that my two biggest loves of the show would be the relationship between Clark/Lex and then of course Lex/Lana.
Which brings me to this...
Q: Looking back, is there anywhere you wish you’d taken the characters of Smallville?
AG: I wish we had a better trajectory for Lana Lang. That was probably a three-season love story that lasted six seasons.
MM: It’s so torturous and slow. Ultimately, it damaged Lana in the audience’s mind. Because Clark refused to tell her the truth about his identity, he was constantly forced to lie to her. Although justified, Lana’s response to his behavior made her seem cold and unsympathetic — even though from her POV, Clark was a sneaky, bold-faced liar.
I've always said that I thought that Clark/Lana should have been over by the end of the S2, at the very least by the end of S3. It lasted way longer than it should have, with too many barn/loft sad eyes and tears, looking back over your shoulder's at you scenes. I'll admit they were cute for the first handful of episodes, but it soon got old and stale there after a while, because I started to feel like the writer's just didn't know which direction they were going to take Lana's character in and I didn't like how they tried to portray her as betraying Chloe because she liked Clark and Clark liked her back, but didn't see Chloe the way that she wanted him to see her. (If that makes any sense...) That friendship that could have been so much more between Lana and Chloe, just wasn't in large part due to Clark and I sort of think that's what you and other's were saying. That Lana seemed to be there to represent either "the girl next door" or "the girl that came between two best friends" and by that I mean Clark/Lex and it was that stupid love triangle that caused the rift between them and not something that could have made the storyline infinitely better and stronger. And you know me and you know that I have made no bones about the fact that Lana is one of my absolute favorite female characters on Smallville and it was because I looked between the lines and saw more to her than what those idiot writer's couldn't seem to figure out what to do with her. I was the most proud of her from S5 onwards in the way that she was written, but even then I still wish she would have been developed more and had been given a chance to grow and figure out who she was, instead of coming across as this scared young woman who was afraid to love the man Lex was and I do believe that she loved him. Nobody can ever convince me otherwise. But, anyway, I did find this interesting to say the least. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-17 11:49 am (UTC)And honestly I feel like the only reason that Clana kept coming back in the end was because of the network, I get the feeling that A&M were always more intrigued by Lexana and were ready to move on to that once high school was over. After season 5 they were talking about their regrets on dragging out the Clana break-up and how it's definitely over forever now, so I feel like they were planning to go in a very different direction with Lex and Lana working together and Lana going on a slightly darker path (which we see hints of in Arrow when she's blackmailing the Doctor, or in Static when she's agreeing with Lex on Level 33.1 and wanting to be included on it). Most likely the network stepped in during season 6 because of the falling ratings, and forced the about-turn that we see from Hydro-Promise with the baby all of a sudden being a fake and Lana saying that she wouldn't have hesitated to see yes if it were Clark asking.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-17 07:19 pm (UTC)They probably were, because with Lexana this provided them with a chance to really develop Lana's character and show her figuring out who she is and wants to be, as well as giving her more character depth. I was really not happy with the Network as well as the pandering to the Clana faction in the fandom either, for as long as they did. I still, to this day, cannot get over the whole Hydro-Promise with the fake baby and Lana's unhesitant "yes" to Clark. This was the most frustrating of them all, because they had so much potential wrapped up in the baby storyline and they could have made Lana and Lex such an amazing dynamic duo. There was never one shred of doubt in my mind that Lex loved Lana or that she loved him and was just too afraid to admit that, because admitting that would mean that there were some darker hints in her as well and she wasn't always the "pretty girl next door who wore pink" for the majority of time for on the show.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-17 10:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-18 03:28 am (UTC)Word. Regarding everything and then some, that you said about S6. I know that it had a few good moments for Lexana, but not that many. Although, I have to admit that I kind of did like Lana being a little cold, I don't know. It just felt more edgey and her, rather than the sweet little bubble gum next door perfect can never do anything wrong, romantic barn/loft Lana that we were given for so long ad nauseum. But, I did hate that she completely turned all feelings off for Lex, again I think it was more of her being scared to acknowledge the fact that she really did love him though. Or at least, that's what I choose to believe, over what we were given because for me if I accept their story and how they weakened one of the most interesting ships on the show other than Clex, well ... you know I'm bound to go a little crazy and have to be locked up. lol.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-18 05:47 am (UTC)It was around the time of Promise and Crimson that I hated how the writers suddenly had Lana turn off all feeling for Lex for no justifiable reason :( Even earlier that that really, because in Trespass too there was a weird cold vibe between them. As soon as they brought back her feelings for Clark, it felt like they suddenly had to write her as turned off by Lex's touch, and that just didn't fit with the writing of them in late season 5 and early season 6 at all when you look back at episodes like Fragile, Static and Wither when she could barely contain her passion for him. It didn't make sense for her feelings to apparently change so much before finding out about the faked pregnancy
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-18 10:03 pm (UTC)To the best of my knowledge, there really was no reason for the writer's to suddenly turn her of of Lex for any reason. They had one hell of an interesting storyline going on between them and it could have been so much more, but no it had to be all teh Clana. I never realized this until you mentioned it, but now that I think about it there was some cool tones in Tresspass.
See, that's what infuriates me the most, the finally give us a ship that actually had the chance to make it for the long haul and be interesting enough to keep people watching and then they do this and just un-write it the best way they can.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-19 11:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-28 08:15 pm (UTC)