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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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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