Melissa may have been the perfect Supergirl. There was nothing about how she played the part that I had problems with. She kept me watching.
Benoist was one of those preternaturally perfect castings. I would rank it almost at Reeve-as-Superman level.
In the released ending we didn't even get some ephemeral "different timeline" happy ending for her either. She just dies.
Yep. It was a case of adding insult to injury, and doing it with conscious intent. I mean, the conclusion where she and Keaton return was actually filmed -- two different versions! That original ending would have gone a long way toward assuaging my bad feelings about the film.
I stopped watching Supergirl after season 2 - spent too long waiting for the writing to actually work out the kinks and get good until I finally realized the awful writing on Supergirl was almost exactly the same as the awful writing on the Flash and Legends of Tomorrow and Arrow and nobody had any interest in fixing it because that was just what the CWverse was. But the thing that definitely did still make some of those shows much better than others was the quality of the casting, and Benoist was at the absolute top of that list, even above Gustin.
Respectfully disagree. The best of the CWDC stuff (including the better seasons of Supergirl) was thoroughly enjoyable pop entertainment, funny and emotional, with engaging characters. I'm not sure what exactly constitutes "awful writing" in your mind, but as long as I wasn't bored, laughed a few times, and had my heartstrings occasionally tugged, I was good. The funnybook storytelling baseline, in any medium, is not usually high art. Though the shows sometimes went a bit deeper than "mere" entertainment to explore socially relevant themes, as in season four of Supergirl and the entire run of Black Lightning, and did so quite successfully to my mind. The Arrowverse was really popular at one time, but I feel like I see more frequent and harsher criticism of it these days. I think the fact that the quality of most of the series declined over time has left a sour taste in some people's mouths, such that they've forgotten how enjoyable it was in the beginning. Oversaturation was probably a factor as well; I winnowed down my own viewing to just my favorite shows several years before the end. Keeping up with them all was starting to feel like more of an obligation than a pleasure. But when it was just Arrow, The Flash, and Supergirl, all in their early, fresh, energetic years? Tons o' fun. Respectfully, and strongly, agree.
I really hope the entire thing remains available on streaming for some years to come, because at some point I'm going to want to do a complete chronological rewatch of all of it. (Which I suppose would have to include Constantine, and maybe The Flash 1990, but I think I'd skip the other series it crossed over with only briefly.)
The beauty of owning Blu-rays is that you are not at the mercy of the streamers. (And for anyone who does still value physical media, it was just announced that the '90s Flash series is coming out on Blu.)
I love the entire Arrowverse, I'd put the shows right up there with the MCU as some of the my favorite superhero adaptations ever. Each of the series did have one or two bad seasons, but for me the hit or miss ratio tended to much more towards the hit than miss.
Except then I'd have to buy the Blu-Rays and the equipment that would let me watch them. Which would be pretty expensive compared to a streaming subscription. I had that on DVD, but the discs were defective and I can't play all the episodes anymore. Every medium has its pluses and minuses. Yes, the Arrowverse is the one other thing in live action that captured the concepts and storytelling style of comic books as authentically as the MCU did, and arguably even more so.
It still cracks me up that the Arrowverse started with the first few seasons of Arrow, where we had them going out of their way to keep things a grounded as possible, and ended up with things like Legends of Tomorrow and Crisis on Infinite Earths. But the way they eased into the bigger and crazier concepts was pretty smart.
Oh, that's common enough. Comics-based series often start out grounded to appeal to a general audience and appease cautious network suits, then gradually ease their viewers into the weirder stuff. The DC Animated Universe started with the relatively down-to-Earth Batman: TAS -- which had its share of sci-fi concepts like robots, mutagenic compounds, time flow accelerators, and the like but avoided things like aliens, time travel, and (with the exception of "Avatar") magic -- but then expanded to Superman and Justice League, which included all that freaky stuff and more. Smallville started out aggressively avoiding anything comic-booky and trying to do Clark Kent's story in a way that would appeal to viewers of Dawson's Creek and Roswell, but in later seasons it started working in more and more comics stuff until it was a Superman show in all but name. Agents of SHIELD started out feeling like a conventional ABC-style government-agent procedural with ordinary people investigating weird phenomena of the week, but gradually added more comics characters and super-powered characters to its cast, and eventually went all-out with storylines about demonic forces, virtual worlds, outer space, and time travel. Even the MCU movies started out with the relatively down-to-Earth, technology-based Iron Man (and Hulk, which was more fanciful but still technically science-based) and took a few years getting around to Thor, then Guardians, then eventually Doctor Strange and so on. Although what's kind of impressive about the Arrowverse is how quickly it escalated the weirdness. Arrow season 1 was a crime drama without superpowers, season 2 brought in Mirakuru supersoldiers, but then we got The Flash and the proliferation of metahumans, and it wasn't long afterward that we got Legends and Supergirl, at which point all bets were off.
I forgot that Smallville and AoS started out more grounded, I was thinking they both jumped right into all the craziness.
I dunno if you could call Smallville grounded. (Apart from the awful pun of Clark not liking to fly.) In the first five eps you have a boy who turns into a million bugs, a girl who can shapeshift into anyone, and a boy who can siphon all heat from any source, both inanimate and biological. Smallville's whole MO in the early days was "meteor rocks cause almost uncountable changes in people". Not a criticism, just an observation.
It wasn't grounded, but it was aggressively un-comic-booky. "No flights, no tights" was its motto. To the uninitiated, it was in the vein of a WB show like Roswell, a teen drama about an alien on Earth, crossed with an X-Files-style "weird case of the week" procedural format. (It even had the same composer as The X-Files.) There were actually fans of Smallville who were surprised when people told them it was connected to Superman, because they were only vaguely familiar with Superman and didn't recognize that names like "Clark Kent" and "Lex Luthor" were connected to the character. People like that, people who'd never picked up a comic book in their life and never would if you paid them, were the show's intended target audience. This was before comic-book movies became hugely successful and prestigious -- respected hits like X-Men were still the exceptions -- so it was still considered a good strategy to run far away from any comic-book elements, the same way The Incredible Hulk did in the '70s-'80s. (The WB did the same thing with its short-lived Tarzan series -- reinventing it as a more conventional genre to attract a wider audience that otherwise wouldn't be interested. That show was done as a New York City police procedural, with Jane Porter as a detective who got involved with John Clayton after he'd been rescued from growing up in the wilds of Africa. The name "Tarzan" was spoken only once in the pilot and never again.) But Smallville kept getting renewed long past the 5-ish years it was originally planned to run, so not only did the public perception of superhero fiction improve during its run, but it used up its original story plans and had to drag in more and more stuff from the comics to keep going. So the original strategy of downplaying the comic-book elements gave way to a fuller embrace of them. It's similar with Agents of SHIELD. Yes, its stories were driven by fanciful sci-fi situations from the start, but the main characters dealing with those situations were not costumed superheroes, just government agents in suits, regular people dealing with extraordinary things. So it felt more like a standard network-TV procedural drama than a superhero story, in order to appeal to ABC's main target audience rather than just the niche audience of comics fans. Once that wider audience was invested in the show and its characters, the producers were able to ease that audience into the wilder and more comic-booky stuff a little at a time, the same way the Arrowverse did.
I found most of the Arrowverse shows incredibly poor, misguided representations of DC, and placed next to the superior Man of Steel-verse, that point was as bright as the sun in what DC shows should never be, with the exception of Black Lightning and the 1st seasons of Supergirl & Batwoman. Since Superman and Lois was not part of the Arrowverse (despite the 1st season not doing much to clarify the separation), it cannot serve as a credit for the Arrowverse.
Since it was originally spun off from Supergirl, I tend to still consider it Arrowverse, just on another Earth.
Yeah. It's pretty clearly just another Earth in the larger Arrowverse, as Supergirl and Black Lightning were originally. All it would take is another crisis (which the DC universe spawns like rabbits) to fold it in with the others.
I'd bet that it was originally intended to be on the same Earth as the other series--and that got changed, probably because the show runners knew the clock was ticking on the end of the other series.