Smallville Creators Reveal WB Execs Wanted to Make Controversial Change for Superman's Parents

When Jonathan Kent was depicted as less-than-perfect in Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, DC fans lost their minds, giving one of the first clear indications that the movie was going to be a controversial take on the Superman mythology. Years before that, though, Smallville could have presented Jon and Martha Kent as a lot less likable, if Warner Bros. TV had their way. In the latest episode of Talkville, a Smallville rewatch podcast hosted by series stars Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum, executive producers Miles Millar and Alfred Gough appeared, and shared some behind-the-scenes tales from the early days of the series.

Superman's relationship with his adoptive parents is generally accepted to be one of the most important aspects of his character, with the morals of Jon and Martha Kent being key to shaping the hero's moral code. A number of comics have presented "what if...?" style scenarios that showed Superman growing up to be a very different person in realities where his rocket crashlanded somewhere other than in the Kents' field.

"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,'" Millar shared with Welling and Rosenbaum. "And it's just much more of a cliché teen drama kind of thing. And we really fought against that."

Smallville premiered in 2001 on The CW, and since then, the network has not been able to shake the superhero bug. At present, they have Superman & Lois, which marks the first live-action TV outing for the Man of Steel since Smallville and the first to actively feature an in-costume Superman since Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman almost a decade earlier than that.  

Smallville ran for ten seasons, with Welling as the series lead for the whole time. Rosenbaum was a series regular for the first seven seasons. The pair were both approached to reprise their roles in The CW's Crisis on Infinite Earths TV event, but Rosenbaum reportedly could not come to financial terms with the network for his cameo, so Welling and his on-screen Lois Lane Erica Durance were there instead.

There have been persistent rumors of a Smallville continuation in the form of an animated series, although nothing official has come out of Warner Bros. yet. The pair teased the project during their press tour for the Smallville 20th anniversary Blu-ray collection last year.

"We're working on animated series that picks up right after our Smallville [finale] and...telling our own story," Welling said during a convention appearance in 2021. "Our vision is that we get Erica. It might be tough to get Allison. But even Sam Jones III [who played Pete Ross] and Lionel Luthor is going to be a big part of that. John Glover wants to do it, we've already been into this. We've already gotten animation, we just don't have the stories yet because Al and Miles are busy doing Tim Burton-like movies. As soon as they are done with that, we're going to do this. I want to be Clark's voice, I want Erica to be Lois's voice. That's going to be the fun of it. I think there's a story that Al and Miles are going to tell that's individual and new and call it a multiverse thing. But let's see where it goes, and it'll be fun, so yeah."

New episodes of TalkVille drop on Wednesdays. You can stream Smallville in its entirety on Hulu.

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