Slider_Quinn21 wrote:Informant wrote:I'm just not sure how I'd go about restructuring the series at this point.
I think it'd take an incident where Alex is killed.
This is pretty much the attitude of Sony towards AMAZING SPIDER-MAN. It never works. Yes, SUPERGIRL made mistakes out the gate where it needed to choose A or B and it chose both. But what's done is done. Rather than try to turn SUPERGIRL into a different show, it would be best to identify the strengths of this mis-mash and make the best of it now. Retooling at this point would only deepen the creative dissonance. What works about SUPERGIRL?
The cast is superb: Melissa Benoist, Chyler Leigh and David Harewood have terrific chemistry, Benoist bouces off Mechad Brooks and Jeremy Jordan nicely, Callista Flockhart is a good foil.
While there are filming issues, the superpowers are for the most part well rendered. The costume and flying effects are terrific, the fight sequences, outside of odd lapses, come off well. It's the superhero action show SMALLVILLE wasn't.
The tone is appealing. This show embraces the goofy, earnest fun of superheroes and presents Supergirl's morality and compassion as intrinsic to her nature and reflective of the potential of all human beings to behave responsibly and well.
Humour: the scripts are full of fun jokes and great wisecracks.
Legacy: the show is respectful of SUPERMAN's cinematic and televisual history, casting Helen Slater and Dean Cain in major roles, and also reflects familiar for the source material with its use of the Martian Manhunter, Toyman, Silver Banshee, etc..
What does not work? I would say that the problem is not that SUPERGIRL doesn't work; it's that all the aspects that work well also work in opposition to each other. Supergirl is a determined and easily intimidated little bookworm of a thrillseeker who works as an intern at a media agency as a highly placed agent of a top secret government agency who is in her late twenties but has no experience dating, making friends, holding down a job or using her powers and has feelings for geek icon Jimmy Olsen who is played by a six foot tall basketball player type.
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I think the only option here is to turn into the swerve. First, it's time to move Winn. When you have Jimmy, you don't need another male friend at Catco, but since the actor's on contract, relocate him to the DEO and make him Alex's associate more than Kara's.
Second, Mehcad Brooks is Jimmy Olsen, deal with it. It's time to shift him from being on the executive staff at Catco to someone whose role is working the streets of National City, gathering stories that will lead to the grounded, ordinary people plots of episodes while Winn and Alex serve the fantasy plots. When Jimmy wanders into a DEO plot, the show should highlight how he feels like he's stumbled into a different TV series.
Third, I think the dissonance in Supergirl should be embraced as representing the schizophrenic nature of Supergirl's life. The series should develop three distinct and separate visual styles: crisp, still filming for the DEO/fantasy plots and documentary style camerawork for the mundane side of the series at Catco. For Season 2, Kara can develop multiple personality disorder as a result of the schism and the show really mine that for drama rather than pretend it doesn't exist.
For better or worse, this is SUPERGIRL. Attempting to turn it into a different show at this stage would just make a bigger mess; one might as well just cancel the series and do a reboot and there's no need to do that. There's plenty to enjoy with SUPERGIRL. SUPERGIRL could be a lot worse.
It could be an ugly, nasty series like GOTHAM or take itself far too seriously like the first 13 episodes of ARROW or be crassly objectifying like Seasons 2 - 7 of SMALLVILLE or be incapable of rendering superheroes like LOIS & CLARK or be a depressing bore like BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN or be witlessly self-important like that WONDER WOMAN pilot or be visually inept like the first 13 episodes of SUPERBOY or be unable to choose a tone like PUNISHER WAR ZONE.
The tone of SUPERGIRL is good. The spirit of the series is strong. The details just need some selective refinement. Choices must be made.