The pandemic absolutely destroyed any sense I had about the passage of time. How else to explain that today marks five years since the premiere of SUPERMAN & LOIS?
As a lifelong Superman fan, this series was a big deal for me on a lot of fronts. It was my first writing credit, my first staff job, and the first time I went to set to produce an episode.
However, it was not my first job in TV. Before that I had been a Writers' PA on NCIS: NEW ORLEANS and a Writers' Assistant on BLOOD & TREASURE - both CBS shows, by coincidence. There was still a bit of an awe to working on a network show back then. I remember almost exactly ten years ago, around mid-April 2016, I found myself alone in the writers' room on NCIS: NOLA. The finale was just about to start shooting so most of the writers had finished their work for the season and had started hiatus. Our upper-levels were mostly working from home and since the production draft of the finale was distributed, I'd been given the go-ahead to finally clear the board of that episode's storybreak.
As I cleaned the cards, I specifically remember thinking that in a month, some 14 million people were going to be in front of their TVs, watching scenes that started right there in the room a couple weeks ago as just a few words on a dry-erase card. 14 MILLION PEOPLE were going to be entertained by the results of ten people debating in this shitty room in Santa Clarita.
I had to consciously remind myself of that because from my perspective, I never felt any audience reaction to the show. My parents and another family from back home watched the show, but beyond that I didn't know anyone in the real world who even seemed aware of it. And this was not a show with a passionate online following, or at least not one in the internet corners where I went. At the start of the season, then-showrunner Jeff Lieber had introduced my public (i.e. non-Bitter) Twitter handle to his followers as the new assistant on the show. I gained about 50 NCIS-related followers from that... but a significant number of those handles were variations on "Mrs. Scott Bakula." It was a reminder where the truly passionate appeal of the show laid.
Thus, as far as feeling the audience's presence... I really didn't. And certainly, had no place where I felt any appreciation of the work that was being done in the writers room. BLOOD & TREASURE had a smaller audience - it premiered at 5.62 million viewers and finished the season at less than half of that - and it still had more linear viewing eyeballs than our highest rated episode of S&L.
But the difference with S&L was that that audience was very much in evidence. They were impossible not find online. The show was regularly discussed on the geek sites I visited often and in comic stores and at conventions, people were familiar with the show and had a deep awareness of the stories.
When you work on a character like Superman, you're very aware there really aren't any Superman shows or movies that become obscure. (The 1988-92 SUPERBOY TV series is an exception, and only because that show was completely pulled from any kind of distribution for decades.) Whatever you make with that character is going to live forever - for good or for ill. I don't know if there will be any 20 year oral histories of BLOOD & TREASURE, but I'm certain that SUPERMAN & LOIS will get some kind of retrospective whenever a big anniversary rolls around.
I'm proud of our contribution to the Superman mythos. I think we honored the characters and who they were supposed to be while also telling our story in a period of Clark and Lois's life that hadn't been covered on-screen before (and was barely touched in the comics too.) I think it was very important that we didn't just retread the Reeve films, or any of the TV shows. The show had its own voice AND a large number of fans watched because they felt it was doing Superman and Lois Lane "right." That kind of result is never effortless.
It was also a show whose creation was defined by the pandemic to some extent. We were ordered to series in January 2020 and the writers' mini-room assembled a month later, in mid-February. At that point, the plan was that the room would work for six weeks mapping out the start of the series. We were figuring out the characters, the long arcs, even sketching in the first six or seven eps conceptually. Then we take a break at the end of March to shoot and edit the pilot, at which point we'd see how all of that played on screen, which in turn would guide the writing and the shooting of subsequent episodes.
As it turned out, all hell broke loose with COVID in mid-March and so we not only started working via Zoom, but the pilot production was pushed. And then it kept getting pushed further and further. As the lockdowns stretched on, there were definitely days where I worried that the show would just be cancelled outright.
By the time we started shooting the pilot in late October, we'd broken 11 or 12 episodes, and had full scripts for most of the episodes before that. It was probably inevitable that many of them would be adjusted as we saw how the actors and storylines were coming across on-screen. And yes, pretty much every episode got rewritten, many of them significantly. It was an enormous amount of work for our upper level writers, but I'll always remember that since we'd spent nearly a year learning more and more about our characters, those rewrites were what really elevated the show to what the audience experienced. Creatively, it was a better show for the extra time we were forced to take making it. Though I did occasionally threaten to have T-shirts made for everyone that said "The Season So Nice, We Wrote It Twice."
Every now and then I'll see one of our detractors snark about "CW writers." The disrespect irked me, even though I should have just taken it as evidence of the speakers complete ignorance and dismissed their statement altogether. Every writer on S&L who wasn't on their first job had credits on premium cable TV shows, network shows, or both. That's a fact that generally holds true across most of the CW shows. I obviously can't speak about shows I didn't work on, but I know that our team worked as hard as any pay-cable staff and took their work equally seriously.
As I've said before - working on this show was a great gift. During the pandemic, particularly during the part of it when my father died, nothing helped preserve my sanity more than being able to go into a room and spend the better part of the day talking about the Superman mythos. I'll also never forget the thrill that came one day in fall when we saw the first costume fitting photos of Tyler in the new suit. I remember thinking it was one of the best on-screen Superman costumes and it was a privilege to be the first to see it. During a dark time, those wins meant everything. The show became my refuge from the pandemic and everything bad associated with it. When it finally premiered, I recall seeing several viewers talk about what it meant to them to have a positive and uplifting show to invest in while they were emotionally processing the horrible year that had just passed.
For a great many reasons, this show will always be inseparable from the pandemic for me. It hung over the entire production, but particularly the first two years. COVID complicated production in so many ways - and certainly this wasn't unique to our show. Our first season was so delayed in starting filming that our final episodes ended up airing deep into summer. The staff had assembled to begin planning Season 2 before the first season had finished airing, and that was so close to the end of shooting that people like our showrunner Todd Helbing had essentially no break between season 1 and season 2. And that's not even getting into how Season 2's airing schedule ended up with some long breaks between episodes because COVID shutdowns slowed production. It made hard jobs even harder.
In spite of all of that, one aspect of SUPERMAN & LOIS I'm most proud of is that if you just take in the episodes themselves, it doesn't feel like a show that was made during COVID. The many compromises don't show up on the screen and I feel pretty confident that the new audiences that discover the show over the next 20 or so years aren't going to have confusion or questions that end up being explained with "We did it that way because of COVID."
As I said, if there's one thing you know about working on these shows it's that some fans will still be talking about it and debating it years later. We already gain new viewers all the time. I pretty regularly see people posing things on social media to the effect of "I just started binging SUPERMAN & LOIS and it's already one of my favorite shows! How did I never hear about this?"
Back in the late 90s, when I was still in school and could only dream of being a TV writer, two of my favorite shows were STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE and HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET. Both shows dealt with complex characters who often had to reckon with thorny moral issues and situations that challenged their belief. Another thing they had in common was that despite critical acclaim, neither one ever had a large audience. Even among their peers, they earned fewer eyeballs than some of their more mainstream cousins.
For me, this also meant that stumbling across someone who was as passionate as I was about those shows was a rare occurrence. It wasn't like finding someone who liked SEINFELD, or FRIENDS, or ER. Those were the most popular shows on TV - of course you'd find people who loved them. But a fellow DS9-er? It also was like a secret handshake that revealed "This person is in the club. This one is a cool guy." In college, there was a guy on the fringes of my friend group who I didn't click with the first time we met. We were definitely oil and water... until the day when we discovered we were both HOMICIDE fans. Almost immediately, we reevaluated each other and our connection through the show turned us into great friends.
And so, on those nights when I'd dream of writing for a show like the ones I'd watch, I often thought about how it probably be more rewarding to write for a DS9. It might not be loved by every Star Trek fan, but the fans you HAD were the kind that would hang on every episode. If you hit that kind of audience, you knew that what you wrote would mean a LOT to a small amount of people.
A Superman show that aired on the least-viewed major network and that probably found most of its audience on streaming probably isn't too far off from the kind of reception I imagined getting all those years ago. As time has gone on, DS9 has become so popular in TREK circles, so often cited as "the best" of all the shows that it has become hard to remember just how mixed a reception it got in its original run. I wonder if I might someday look back at this post on a subsequent anniversary and remark that SUPERMAN & LOIS's audience has bloomed similarly?
But even if it doesn't, it was an honor to be a part of this show, no matter how big the audience was.