Supergirl

[Totenkindly]

Supergirl pilot leaks, good news! | Polygon

This is supposed to come out in November on CBS.

A copy of it "leaked" last week onto the Internet (it isn't clear whether it was a true leak or a purposeful promotional stunt by the studio), so I happened to watch that over the weekend.

Overall, I liked it.

It's not quite as serious / intent as Game of Thrones or Daredevil, but not quite as cheesy like Hercules/Xena. It operates somewhere in-between the two, on a more casual level.

I think Melissa Benoist does a decent job in the title role, as a young woman who means well but doesn't necessarily have it all together. It does seem to VERY MUCH target the teen girl and young adult women viewer market (to me).

I think one thing that works is that it brings more light and positive into a superhero genre that is dominated by grit and darkness at the moment. I appreciate this darker shift when it occurred, but it's still okay to have more positive/upbeat movies and shows as well. "Man of Steel" took a lot of complaints in this regard, and I think Supergirl actually is one attempt to take things in a brighter direction as far as orphans of Krypton go.

The pilot doesn't really get hung up on backstory much. Kara knows who she is, and we SEE who she is in the first five minutes and then the show just keeps moving right along.

I thought the special effects and fights were pretty decent for network TV, tbh. And she does get tossed around. That's another angle that we often don't see. Yeah, she's pretty invulnerable, and she's really strong, but she lacks any real fighting experience... so once she starts tangling with someone who knows what he's doing, she just gets trounced pretty badly. She needs to hone her skills, versus just relying on innate ability.

(... and yes, she does save a plane... but considering she didn't know what the heck she was doing, it was pretty cool.)

I'm not sure how the show will pan out long-term. It depends on the direction they take it and the tone they persist with. The current high-concept plot involves

a bunch of criminals having escaped from the Phantom Zone along with Kara, when her ship got free, and as it turns out her mom was the judge who put them away, so as part of their vengeance on her dead mother, they would like to punish her. And there's also the issue of a particular relative who apparently is still alive as well and is a criminal...

Superman doesn't really appear, but he's mentioned multiple times as if he is part of the continuity.

 

[EJCC]

[MENTION=7]Totenkindly[/MENTION]

Just watched the first couple episodes of this. Does it get better? I like Kara, a lot, and I find her fairly compelling*, but 1. I don't like any of the other characters thus far, and 2. I hate how much they reference Superman. I know that it's supposed to be frustrating to an extent, having literally everyone in the damn world see her as "second best", but I hate watching it. Maybe because -- and again, I know this is intentional on the part of the showrunners -- that kind of treatment is so typical of women entering into an industry where men have succeeded before them, having to do twice as well as the men to be seen as equal to them.

Maybe I'd feel differently if I actually read more of the comics. But so much of those first few episodes feels... patronizing. And while I would certainly hope and expect Kara to rise to the challenge and not be seen that way afterwards, I guess I don't see how that would happen? Or at least I can't envision what that would look like.


*One of my favorite parts of the show is seeing her work through her internalized view of herself as "less" -- less deserving, less heroic -- in a way that women and girls everywhere can relate to.

 

[Totenkindly]

I don't really know. I only ever watched a few episodes of it.
I was kinda "Ehh, maybe? Maybe not?"

I mean, it actually at least felt like a positive show versus pointlessly edgy, but at the same time it felt more on a "Once Upon a Time" level -- they're both "family oriented" and thus aimed more at a mid-range of female teen viewers which isn't necessarily a demographic approach that appeals to me personally.

I considered watching a bit more now that it just released on Netflix.

 

[highlander]

Ah, it's a classic...