*Disclaimer: Over the seasons, I’ve come to truly love Supergirl, handwavy silliness and all. However, that doesn’t change the fact that seasons 2 and 3 featured a major Latinx character played by a white actress. The extra-irritating thing about this is that, in the comics, Maggie Sawyer is white, so they could’ve just had the white actress play her as white. But they specified Maggie as a PoC in her first appearance and established her as clearly Chicana in season 3. Why?! It’s so frustrating – “diversity points” don’t count when they’re not real diversity, and this was an important example of Supergirl failing to live up to its own ideals.*
It took
me a little while to get into Supergirl,
and overall, I definitely rank it below the Marvel shows, but I still enjoy
it. (Side note: I do
think the Jessica Jones comparisons
are unfair. The two series/characters
are so hugely different, and the fact
that they’re both female-led superhero shows that premiered around the same
time doesn’t mean Supergirl has to be
Jessica Jones in order to be
good.) Over the course of its first
season, quite a few bumps got evened out, and I hope it continues to grow and
improve.
First
off, let me cop to knowing only very
basic Superman 101 and nothing about Supergirl, so I can’t speak to how well it
stacks up to other adaptations or the comics.
What I can tell you is that, at the same time baby Kal-El was sent away
from the dying planet Krypton, his tween cousin Kara was sent after him in a
separate pod, the idea being that Kara would take care of Kal-El and help him
as both adjusted to living on an alien planet (Earth) whose yellow sun gave
them godlike powers. However, Kara’s pod
is knocked off course and waylaid in some sort of time stasis, and by the time
she finally reaches Earth, Kal-El has already grown up and become
Superman. He sets Kara up with an
adopted family to have a typical life on Earth, but of course, that’s only
going to last so long. As a young adult,
Kara uses her powers in an impulsive rescue and ends up revealing herself to
the world as a superhero. She works on
getting used to the hero game, going through a lot of trial and error while she
tries to balance her work at the DEO (a super-secret, alien-monitoring
government organization) with her secret identity as the personal assistant for
a self-impressed media mogul.
The
show is very conscious that Supergirl
is a female superhero, and that can be both awesome and groanworthy, sometimes
in equal measure. I like how the series
plays with gender double standards, such as people scrutinizing Supergirl’s
outfit, being far quicker to judge her for her mistakes, and generally assuming
she’s out of her depth. Kara has some great
scenes with her boss Cat, who, as the head of a media empire, knows a thing or
two about the tightrope of being a woman in power (Kara’s relationship with Cat
is pretty neat, as is her relationship with her adopted sister Alex.) At the same time, though, things sometimes
veer over to the preachy side, making the characters feel more like mouthpieces
for feminism than feminist characters.
It’s
also probably the sunniest comic-book adaptation I’ve ever seen – although it
can go to some serious places, particularly when it deals with Kara’s
displacement from her home world, the go-to vibe is all shininess and
positivity. This can make it cheesy
sometimes (and even when it does come
to the more serious stuff, some of the villains are definitely cheesy,) but it also makes it feel noticeably different
than so much of the Dark! Gritty! stuff
out there. Melissa Benoist (who I now
realize was terribly wasted in the absolute worst seasons of Glee) is fantastic as Kara, adorable as
a basket of puppies while also being compassionate, strong, out of her element
but determined to learn, and just alien enough to remind you that Earth is her
second home. When the dialogue gets too
pointed or the tone gets too saccharine, she’s what grounds the show and makes
Kara feel real and human – or rather, Kryptonian.
Warnings
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