It's easy to forget, in our superhero-obsessed pop culture world today, that there was a time not very long ago where TV shows about superheroes could be, well, kryptonite. "Smallville" took a new tactic. Instead of the earnest, campy, crime-solving shows of decades past, the WB drama combined a superhero origin story with all the trappings of a typical teen drama. We meet Clark Kent as a dorky high school student struggling to control his out-of-this-world powers. The show's famous rule against showing Superman in costume or in flight kept Clark's story grounded, even as later seasons introduced a colorful cast of supporting characters straight from the pages of DC Comics. Later superhero shows have experimented with genre and gone much darker, but none of it could have happened without "Smallville."
