Right now, it feels like Superman is everywhere. We’re not talking about on the pages of DC Comics, though the iconic hero is very prominent there with multiple ongoing titles at any given time. We’re talking more in the realm of live-action entertainment with the hero set to appear in this summer’s Supergirl movie just a year after his triumphant return to the big screen in James Gunn’s Superman, not to mention work on the follow up, Man of Tomorrow currently underway. Before that, he was on the small screen, most recently in The CW’s Arrowverse adjacent Superman & Lois and, before that, the iconic long-running series, Smallville.
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But while all of those portrayals of Superman brought the iconic character’s heroics to the screen and told great stories of him fighting evil large and small, there was another series before all of them that offered audiences something a little bit different when it came to Superman. It’s a series that, while it didn’t shy away from or avoid his superhero side, it also helped to bring his “humanity” into focus by following his life as Clark Kent and, most importantly, focused on what might be the most important element of Superman’s story—his romance with Lois Lane. It was a unique era for Superman, and it ended 29 years ago today: Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.
Lois & Clark Was As Much About, Well, Lois and Clark as It Was About Superman
While Clark Kent/Superman’s relationship with Lois Lane factors in pretty much every live-action adaptation of the superhero’s story, Lois & Clark approached things differently. The first major Superman project following the era of Christopher Reeve’s portrayal of the hero, the ABC series certainly followed Superman’s heroics, but the core of the story was relationships. In the series we see Clark (Dean Cain) meet Lois (Teri Hatcher) as they work together at the Daily Planet, and we watch their relationship unfold. The first season in particular is fantastic in terms of the relationship. Clark is into Lois; Lois is infatuated with Superman. Lex is interested in Lois, who is still into Superman, and Lois eventually starts to develop feelings for Clark, which she tries to ignore. It’s messy, it’s complicated, and it was an aspect of Superman that we really hadn’t gotten much of.
As the series went on, we’d eventually see Lois and Clark together with Lois figuring out Clark’s secret identity. They would get engaged and then married—though it was quite a journey to get there and the wedding ultimately coincided with Superman and Lois’ wedding in comics and while the series still saw plenty of Superman being, well, Superman it never lost sight of his relationship. The series ended after four seasons in 1997 and while Clark Kent wasn’t off our screens for long, when he returned in 2001 in The WB’s Smallville, we got a story about his teen years and we wouldn’t see Lois for quite some time.
Nearly 30 Years Later, Lois & Clark Remains Unique
What makes Lois & Clark particularly special even now is that, nearly 30 years later, the show remains unique. We still haven’t seen anything quite like it in terms of fully exploring the Lois/Clark romance. One could argue that we got echoes of it with Superman & Lois, but while that show did have its elements, it was less about Lois and Clark and more about heroics and family on a more extended scale with that particular series giving us a version of the hero who is married and has children. Even on the big screen with Superman, the relationship with Lois is just a piece of the story, one we’re dropped into with their relationship already in progress, albeit relatively new. Really, Lois & Clark was very much its own unique era for Superman in live action, and it ended on a happily ever after note with the couple getting a family of their own 29 years ago today.
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