(no subject)

[frelling_tralk]

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.

Comments

[cinderella81.livejournal.com]

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.

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 ...

[rogueslayer452.livejournal.com]

I never really got into Smallville, though I did see some episodes throughout its long run (my sister was a fan, at least for the beginning half of the show) and I was always in the camp to really like Lana Lang, which is considered a highly unpopular opinion amongst the fandom. Though ITA that the show did a great disservice towards her, and I felt that Kristen Kreuk deserved better for her time on the show.

[tasabian.livejournal.com]

Al & Miles always come across as such dicks in their interviews. I don't like AG's dismissive comments on Tom in that article- dude, the cast CARRIED you for years! People were not tuning into SV for the writing.

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.

smallville

[laceymcbain.livejournal.com]

I find the writers always dismissive of the fans in these interviews, and they have a tendency to blame everyone but the writing/direction of show for poor ratings. I didn't care for Lana in general as a character mainly because they didn't know what to do with her, and like you, I get really tired of women's roles only being about the men they're with. I hated it when they made the rift between Lex and Clark seem to be about the relationship with Lana. Bleh. I started watching the show because of the Clark/Lex friendship, and that to me was what I wanted in the show. How do you go from best friends to bitter enemies? What does it take to make that happen? What choices?

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.

[jlvsclrk.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this. It was pretty obvious towards the end how little the CW cared for Smallville - what network thinks its a good idea to move their top rated show to Friday? - and the budget cuts certainly showed for things like lighting and exterior shots. But I still loved it. In a way, I wish AlMiles had left after 3 seasons when its kind of clear they lost interest and were just looking for a way to spin off the series.

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).

[mobiusklein.livejournal.com]

I agree with the other posters that both men don't get that it wasn't just the length of the love story but the fact that was the only thing consistent about her.

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.

[ditzyfish.livejournal.com]

Well I thought Lana only really became interesting in the show when they paired her with Lex. Clark seemed to be over her and was embracing his heritage and powers and things were moving forward and then they completely back tracked for reasons we'll still never know. So I don't know why they're complaining about how dragged out the Clana was when they appeared to going in another direction during season 5 - early 6 and then suddenly decided to put her back with Clark :/
Meh.

[yourlibrarian]

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.

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.

[apeygirl.livejournal.com]

Agreed with everyone above about Lana and where they messed up with her.

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. :)

[sum1-different.livejournal.com]

["Listening to fan boys is tiring"}

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.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_touched/]

*Appropriate icon is appropriate.*

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. :)