Could a METROPOLIS tv show work?

[The Red Monk]

I'm sorry Red Monk and Auguste Dupin, I just realized my reaction was kind of a knee-jerk one. I read into is WAY more than was intended, and I'm sorry for that.

Auguste, would you be willing to give us your idea? I read back through this and I couldn't seem to find it.

It's fine, no offense taken.

[brucekent12]

I think the last three seasons of Smallville was basically a Metropolis series, just without the name change.

[daBronzeBomma]

There are a couple of valid reasons for the next live-action Superman television show (coming sometime after the Cavill Era has officially ended) to be done in a format similar to the critically acclaimed MARVELS miniseries from 1993.

1) Superman is already the undisputed king of super-heroic television. With 4 separately successful TV series under his belt, the challenge becomes how to find a new angle on the character. He's garnered more overall live-action screen-time (TV and Movies combined) than any other superhero by a country mile. It's going to be hard to do a new Superman on live-action TV without tripping over what came before: ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, SUPERBOY, LOIS & CLARK and SMALLVILLE equals 24 seasons of Clark Kent and a lot of ground already covered. By switching the perspective to multiple secondary characters within the Superverse (Chiefly the main trio of Lois Lane, Lex Luthor and Jimmy Olsen; but also other Metropolis residents such as Perry White, John Henry Irons, Maggie Sawyer, Morgan Edge, etc) as they interact with Clark Kent/Superman as well as each other brings a new dynamic to the overall saga.

I wouldn't recommend this approach for any Hollywood Hero Rookie. This other-perspective would not work for, say, Aquaman or Vixen or Silver Surfer. None of those characters have had anywhere near the amount of public familiarity that Superman has enjoyed for decades now. This would only work for Comicdom's True Trinity (each of whom are arguably already over-exposed to some extent): Superman, Batman and Spider-Man. Everyone else from either DC, Marvel or elsewhere would need to be the central star in their own show.

2) Television budgets will ALWAYS lag behind feature film budgets. Remember how cool Christopher Reeve looked when he flew in SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE in 1978? And remember how kinda meh Dean Cain looked when he flew in LOIS & CLARK, even though it was made fifteen years later, in 1993? Two words: available budget. Big feature films will always have a much larger scale budget and access to cutting-edge technology than TV ever will at the same time period. And Superman, the most powerful of the superheroes, requires a whole lot of cash to make his fights look epic. That's feature film money, not TV (or even HBO) money. If you want that, then buy a ticket to BATMAN V. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (ugh, such a stupid title, btw) in 2016. You have to make that dollar stretch in TV-land. Doing it this way keeps the budget costs down while still showing something that doesn't look shoe-string.

You're not going to get a full-on, live-action version of SUPERMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES on TV and not have it look like second-hand crap. You're just not. The special visual effects will always look cheap by comparison to the movies.

I like the idea of METROPOLIS being the inverse of GOTHAM in this sense: Gotham is what changed Bruce Wayne and gave birth to Batman, while itself never changing; Superman is what changed Metropolis and gave birth to the City of Tomorrow, itself always evolving.

Before Superman, Metropolis looked more like this:

Very old-school real-world, maybe art deco-ish.

After Superman, Metropolis becomes more like this:

Very futuristic aesthetic, always moving forward but not too far ahead of real-world.

Superman's debut would be the agent of change that revitalizes Metropolis and causes an explosion in commerce and technology and population.