Why I’ll miss Superman and Lois, the best comics adaptation going 

The best superhero on screens lately hasn’t been anywhere near movie theatres – for me, it’s been Tyler Hoechlin’s firmly joyful, human portrayal of Clark Kent in Superman and Lois, which ended its four-season run this week. (Some mild spoilers ahead!)

I’ve been a big fan of this series since it kicked off and if anything, in its final days it got even better. Unlike the cluttered, overstuffed recent Marvel Cinematic Universe productions, where everything has to lead to the next thing, Superman and Lois has kept its focus relatively intimate, leveraging a smaller budget as best it could to deliver superhero action with a lot of heart. Unlike The Boys or other edgy shows, it’s not about taking apart the superhero idea – it’s about revelling in its simple possibilities. 

The show has been deliberately small in scale, with the Man of Steel and his family moving back to his childhood home of Smallville in order to give his sons a normal life. Previous Superman TV series like the very ’80s Lois and Clark and Smallville never quite worked for me – they were either cheesy or overly padded. Superman and Lois has combined life’s brutal truths with heartfelt optimism, and while your mileage may vary, for me it’s one of the most emotional Superman stories yet. 

This final, fourth season has delivered the one thing earlier seasons lacked – a stunning villain in Michael Cudlitz’s psychotic, jacked-up Lex Luthor, who’s been released from prison after years and consumed with vengeance. For the final 10 episodes, Superman and Lois stuck to the tightening Luthor-Superman feud as it built up, right on up to doing a pretty decent (if slightly too speedy) take on the famous “Death of Superman” comics run. 

Lex Luthor is the yin to Superman’s yang, the over-achieving human who is filled with greedy contempt and the powerful alien who lives his life with humility. 

A real strength of Superman and Lois is it feels like the story has moved forward, rather than circling around and around the same tired plot beats. It’s given us things we’ve never seen in a Superman live action project before – a married Superman with children with their own powers, a Superman whose identity is eventually revealed to the world, a Lex Luthor wearing that groovy ‘80s battle armor and actually throwing down in a fistfight with Superman … and most importantly, it’s given us an ending. 

Superhero stories rarely ever really end, but in its masterful final episode, Superman and Lois firmly draws an ending to this particular story of Superman. Maybe it’s just because 2024 has been kind of a shit year, but it got me all weepy-eyed like a superhero film/TV show hasn’t in a long while. 

I’m quite looking forward to James Gunn’s own Superman movie next year, which promises to also capture some of the hope and awe vibe sorely missing from Zach Snyder’s Superman, but it’s a bit of a shame that Hoechlin’s TV portrayal has never quite broken through to the mainstream. He’s the best Superman in my mind since Christopher Reeve – powerful yet fair, caring yet resolved. 

The moment in one of the final episodes where Superman is forced to reveal his identity in public after years of denial is pitch-perfect, and sums up the quiet power that the best episodes of the show have managed: 

Now, it hasn’t all been perfect – a little too much soap opera with the teenagers, a little too much emphasis on the dull as dishwater Lana Lang’s family – but whenever Hoechlin and Tulloch were on screen, the show felt refreshingly sincere. This Superman radiates hope, no matter the odds.  

It’s easy for something to get lost in the avalanche of superhero content these days but Superman and Lois was a quiet gem of inspiration reminding us why we like superheroes in the first place. 

At its heart, Clark and Lois are decent people trying to live decent lives. Some may call that corny. To me, that’s not the worst thing to look up to, these days.