Review 441: Supergirl (Season 1)

Once upon a time in 1984, there was a Supergirl film that probably nobody remembers. Well, now the "Girl of Steel" has been successfully revitalised for the 21st Century in the form of a 20 episode season

Twelve-year-old Kara Zor-El (Malina Weissman) escapes the doomed planet Krypton with her parents' help at the same time as her cousin, infant Kal-El. Protected and raised by her foster family the Danvers, Kara grew up in the shadow of her foster sister, Alex (Chyler Leigh), and learned to conceal the phenomenal powers she shares with her famous cousin in order to keep her identity a secret.
Years later at 24, Kara (Melissa Benoist) lives in National City assisting media mogul and fierce taskmaster Cat Grant (Calista Flockhart). She works alongside her friend and IT technician Winslow "Winn" Schott, Jr. (Jeremy Jordan) and famous photographer James Olsen (Mehcad Brooks), who Cat just hired away from the Daily Planet to serve as her new art director.
However, Kara's days of keeping her talents a secret are over when Hank Henshaw (David Harewood), director of the D.E.O., a secret organisation dedicated to monitoring extra-terrestrial activity on Earth where her sister also works, enlists her to help them protect the citizens of National City from sinister threats.
Though Kara will need to find a way to manage her newfound empowerment with her very human relationships, her heart soars as she takes to the skies as Supergirl to fight crime.

Structurally and in terms of genre. Supergirl is very much a procedural: There are very much crime cases throughout the season but what exec. producers Ali Adler and Greg Berlanti have realised so well is a real season long arc for our titular heroine. The beauty of this show is that it has serialised story elements woven into cases of the week. Supergirl is very much a crime solver so she's going to have to solve a crime or two.

What separates us from them? Who's the us and who is the them? Are we more alike than it seems at first? Those are some the questions that Supergirl - Season 1 ponders throughout its run.

As the Season goes on, Supergirl is surround by a cast of colourfully eclectic characters who make up the various supporting and recurring roles as well as the various monsters-of-the-week that filter out throughout the run of the season.
Some of these characters come from the comics whilst others are created specifically for this show.

Directors Glen Winter, Dermott Downs, Kevin Tancharoen, Jesse Warn, Larry Teng, Karen Gaviola, Nick Gomez, Adam Kane, Jamie Babbit, Lexi Alexander, Chris Fisher direction is ,  the cinematography is beautiful and captures the beauty, advanced and bustling environment of National City, the production design is excellent, the costumes are colourful, the score by Blake Neely is terrifically pulse pounding,

As for spectacle, the special effects are mostly decent given that they're working on a television budget thereby limiting its scope and are mostly saved for creating environments or showcasing Supergirl's flying sequences and other characters powers and do a great job of making the scale of the show bigger than your average TV show.

Melissa Benoist absolutely positively lays claim to this shows titular heroine. Playing Kara Danvers as a multi-faceted character. Outwardly an exceptionally kind, caring selfless and brace heroine to the people of National City but she also lacks the confidence of her cousin and is short tempered and acts on her emotions and craves a normal life even though she's not human and those are the layers that start to unravel as the season goes on. As a child she's weighed down by her traumatic past of having to leave Krypton, being trapped in her pod for so long and scared of what the future may hold for her as one of the last members of her race.

Chyler Leigh as Alex Danvers. Ever since Eliza and Jeremiah Danvers took Kara in, the two of them have become close to the point of being inseparable yet she couldn't help but envy Kara for all her extraordinary gifts and she feels that she could never live up to her
She's a tough cookie.
There's nothing cynical about their relationship. There's nothing beyond that.

Mehcad Brooks is, there's no other word for it, cool as James Olsen. With this version of James Olsen, you get the sense that this version is a "legacy" version of the character: someone who has been around Superman for while and whose heroic acts have rubbed off of him and made him a more confident and independent guy.

Winn is very much the heart and soul of the show,

Over the course of the season, Lucy goes from being a romantic rival to Kara to one of her most intelligent, resourceful and invaluable allies.

Calista Flockhart is In her own tough love sort of way, Cat is more like Dumbledore or Mr. Miyagi whereas as Hank Henshaw is more like M or Nick Fury, he's Kara and Alex's boss at the D.E.O. but he's not necessarily the voice of reason.
A rude, snobby, snide, snarky, sarcastic boss who ultimately meant well. As the boss to both the mild mannered Kara and the confident, optimistic Supergirl, Cat knows every button to press psychologically in order to challenge her and make her a better person.

Over the course of the season, there are a number of great guest stars including (but not limited to) Henry Czerny, Buffy's Emma Caulfield, Eddie McClintock, Jeff Branson, Chris Browning, Iddo Goldberg, Owen Yeoman,

Czerny, in particular, has a very meaty and creepy role as the "Big Bad" of Ep. 10: Childish Things Winslow Schott/The Toyman, Winn's estranged father. A dastardly toymaker who creates
He claims to love Winn yet he manipulates him into assisting him in carrying out his plans.

There's even a guest appearance from Barry Allen/The Flash (Grant Gustin) in Ep. 18: Worlds Finest, popping over from his own show to team up with Supergirl and it's simply a treat for fans and non-fans alike. Their interactions together are ernest, funny, witty and sincere and Gustin and Benoist's chemistry simply sizzles onscreen.
The episode is also a brilliant way to introduce Supergirl to the wider "Arrowverse".

Two recurring stars who deserve mention are newcomers, Brit Morgan and Italia Ricci as Leslie Willis/Livewire & Siobhan Smythe/Silver Banshee.

Siobhan is someone who's so selfish, who's views on humanity are so low and thinks that any kindness shown is a cheap facade that she finds the very concept of people acting with altruism and honour laughable, no matter how many times she's proved otherwise and failing to grasp that these things help people in general get by in life.
She's a person clearly living in her own world and seems incapable of seeing things the way they are. She aspires to be "the next Cat Grant" which in her view means acting like an A*hole and manipulating everyone around her and doesn't think she's done anything wrong by selling a scoop on Supergirl to Cat's rival the Daily Planet.
She's thinks that she's a brilliant aspiring journalist and can't understand why anyone would be angry that she cheated to get to the top and she thinks she's so in the right that she tries to get Kara fired from her job blaming her for all of her troubles.

Livewire, on the other hand is the extreme antithesis to Kara, both are proteges to Cat Grant who pushes them to be the best versions of themselves
A confrontational shock jock who clearly never had any restrictions put on the people/subjects she targeted during her broadcasts, when she goes off on one about Supergirl is when Cat officially draws the line

Pity the same can't be said for the seasons Big Bads in the form of fellow Kryptonian survivors Astra (Laura Benanti), Kara's aunt and her husband Non (Chris Vance). Benanti does fine as the former but never really evolves into a standout villain.
As much as the familial bond and conflict between her and Kara seems interesting on paper, it never comes across in a way that engages us as an audience.
The two of them have an interesting back-story of being banished to the Phantom Zone after resorting to extreme measures to save Krypton from destruction. But the problem is that methods and objectives remain frustratingly vague and opaque for much of the season. They want to save Earth, but to what end?
Astra never really amounts to anything more than a gender-flipped General Zod: A high ranking Kryptonian military general who has a personal connection to the heroes parents who reappears to try and take over the Earth for the own reasons.  Not helping matters was the fact that Benanti was forced to leave halfway through the shows run because she had commitments to Broadway leaving Non to take helm of the overarching villain. Unfortunately, very little effort was made to flash out Non and he generally ended the season as something of a one-note character.

More intriguing is Maxwell Lord (Peter "Carlisle Cullen" Facinelli), he brings the charm and charisma required for the role, even if he's a stand in for Lex Luthor and comes across as a formidable foil to Supergirl. He trusts no one but himself and believes that superheros make people complacent and that ordinary people need to rely on themselves.
At the end of the day, he is, in his own, twisted way, trying to make the world a better place.

As a result, Supergirl works better as a procedural with Kara and the DEO finding new and creative ways to bring down the various villains of the week interspersed with character arcs.

Overall Supergirl - Season 1 was a tad uneven at times - some episodes were better than others - though plenty of them were standouts - and it stumbled somewhat in its final two episodes, but the overall quality of the season was very consistently entertaining, it has a lot of heart and it defiantly shows a lot of potential, 4/5.

The Anonymous Critic.