In terms of being just like the comic book, yes, The Flash was the last one. Lois & Clark was just nonsense and bullshit, as was Smallville. Neither was like the source it was based on (IMHO), except for some small things in each show. I won't miss them much, and hope that this new Wonder Woman show will last longer than The Cape.
What about the Tick? I think the Swampthing pre-dated Lois and Clark but can I get a hell yeah if you wanted another 13 episodes of Birds of Prey? Which is quite amusing if you think of it as all Earth Two from the 70s B-Story in the Wonder Woman Comics with Huntress as Batman's daughter as much as taking reference from the comic, and seeming to be an honestish sequel to Tim Burton's Batman II even if the Joker died in the First movie but frakk it that was a live action replay of the Killing Joke.
Lois and Clark was great. Smallville had moments - usually the ones not involving Clark or Lana. And Birds of Prey had promise.
The Flash TV show was really a hybrid of the Barry Allen/Wally West Flash and took quite a few liberties as I recall so I wouldn't call it any "truer" to the source material than any of the others.
I enjoyed "Lois and Clark". I think it balanced the superhero elements with the more drama oriented stuff very well. It leaned towards drama initially, but eventually the superhero quotient balanced out. I was just saying to my gf the other day that Smallville was a study in highs and lows. There are moments that really grip you as a Superman fan, and there are others that make you want to cringe in a corner (mostly involving Lana whining). I gave up on the show around S5. I intend to revisit it soon as many have said later seasons focused more on the comic book aspects. BoP had a good set up. I really really wanted it to work, but it was a hard sell to push a "Batman but not Batman" show. I think it would have helped if Batman had appeared in at least two or three episodes here and there to keep the momentum going before the show took off on its own. I wrote a long post on this board ages ago about how I thought they could have pushed the show in a great direction in S2 (mostly involving the return of Joker and Batman to explain where the heck Bruce is). I hope WW is able to balance out the drama and the comic book elements as well. I'm also hoping for some good fight choreography. I just watched the recent WW animated movie and was impressed by the action in it (and surprised at some of it too!).
Well, yeah, but the problem there wasn't that Lois and Clark got together; it was that their getting together coincided with Lois and Clark being taken over by new showrunners who treated the show as a joke and ran it into the ground quality-wise.
I must admit I'm surprised by the amount of Smallville hate on here, because it's one of my favorite shows. I will admit it wasn't that great for the first 3 or 4 years, but once Clark got out of high school, and they started bringing in more comic book elements, it's gotten a hell of a lot better. I actually just started watching BoP recently on TheWB.com, and so far I'm really enjoying it (I'm only up to episode 4 so it's fairly early still). Were they really going to bring in Joker and Batman in season 2?
It was actually dumping Levine that did it - they revamped the show, eliminating the more interesting versions of Olsen and White and pretty quickly sidelining Luthor. They made it into a dumber, more traditional though comedic superhero show. Whatever wit and originality it had left with the producer who'd developed it.
Well, I agree it was a different show in the second season than the first, and in some ways it was a change for the worse (particularly dumping the very charismatic Michael Landes as Jimmy Olsen and replacing him with the extremely bland Justin Whalen). But overall I felt season 2 did a better job than season 1 at balancing the romantic-comedy aspects with the superhero-adventure aspects, and was reasonably strong overall, if different from what was intended. But when they changed showrunners again at the start of season 3, that's when it really started to go downhill, because Eugenie Ross-Leming and Brad Buckner simply didn't seem to respect the premise or take it at all seriously, and it became more and more of an embarrassing joke, culminating in a series finale that seemed designed to make us grateful when the show was cancelled.
^ Apparently they replaced Landes because they felt he was too similar to Dean Cain. But yes, he was more charismatic than Whalen.
I just read on Blastr that there is a chance Linda Carter might appear in the new series. I just watched the first episode of her WW show, and after that I would love to see her pop up here. But there is one thing that's been bugging me, everyone keeps calling this a reboot. But I was under the impression that it was a completely new series based off of the comics, not the old show.
Seems likely. After all, the Hoff appeared in that pathetic Knight Rider revival. This will fare almost as well.
This has seemed nigh inevitable for a while now. It should be fun. What kind of losers write for these supposedly professional sites, anyway?
"Reboot" is not a term that has a strict, formal definition. It's slang usage to begin with -- multiple layers of slang, in fact (the TV/movie usage is slang derived from the computer usage, which in turn is derived from the idiom "pull yourself up by your bootstraps"). It's used for anything that's starting over with a new continuity of its own rather than directly continuing a pre-existing series. It would be just as (in)valid to call it a "remake," as people often do with new movie adaptations of books or stories.