It was a love triangle built for two. And while most are celebrating the anniversary of the premiere of The X-Files this week, it’s not the only show to hit a big 30 year milestone. Yes, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman premiered 30 years ago today (September 12), and hitting that big number is bringing up a lot of memories for this writer.
Developed by Deborah Joy LeVine, Lois & Clark focused on… well, Lois and Clark… even moreso than his costumed alter ego of Superman, who still appears. The two-hour pilot episode which aired on September 22, 1993 is to this day one of my favorite Superman “movies;” one thing that makes it special is that this Clark Kent is a good guy even before he puts on tights and a cape. Dean Cain played Clark with a worldly earnestness that could both attract and annoy Lois simultaneously. Teri Hatcher as Lois Lane was walking proof of why Clark Kent would fall for her so quickly. She was feisty, determined, and brilliant.
I was a teenager when Lois & Clark hit the air in 1993. It premiered the same night as NBC’s heavily-promoted seaQuest DSV from Steven Spielberg, and back in those days, there was no DVR and no later streaming so I had to watch one and tape the other. Sadly, I taped seaQuest, which meant I wouldn’t get to see the Lois & Clark pilot again until repeats much later. At school, my TV Production teacher loved the show and we’d often talk about it. My 11th grade English teacher scared me, telling me he thought Lois & Clark was going to be cancelled at the end of the season. Fortunately, it wasn’t, but in the pre-Internet age, I had no way of knowing, and I remember watching the Season 1 finale with the thought that it could possibly be the last. Imagine being in the pre-spoiler era and seeing that cliffhanger at the end of “Barbarians at the Planet!”
There were some changes as Season 2 began. Deborah Joy LeVine was out, and the Daily Planet set was refurbished. The Season 2 premiere makes a joke about e-mail as if it’s a thing Lois Lane has never heard of. The Season 2 premiere “Madame Ex” aired on the first night I was ever on the Internet… and I remember how all of us on the Prodigy message boards for the show had some questions. “Where’s Cat? Where’s Jack? Where’s the real Jimmy?” (Justin Whalin replaced Michael Landes for Season 2 onward. Eventually, we all came to accept and love him. We also gave a name to his black and white checkered shirt – “Ned.”) Season 2 started a little rough, but by “Season’s Greedings” (penned by Dean Cain himself), the magic was back. Later episodes in Season 2 finally got the lead characters together, and we got to meet such fun characters as Dr. Friskin (Lois’ therapist) and the sarcastic and witty time traveler “Tempus” who was accompanied by H.G. Wells.
By the end of Season 2, there were several places for FoLCs – or Fans of Lois & Clark – to congregate. It was around that time that a friend and I launched the “Krypton Club Newsletter,” an online mailing list and newsletter that ultimately led to the website you are reading now. An issue of the newsletter even went out the night that I graduated from high school. Elsewhere, a photo of Teri Hatcher wrapped in Superman’s cape was the most downloaded photo on the Internet once upon a time! Fans gathered on places such as AOL message boards as well as an IRC channel called #loiscla. (I acknowledge that most readers don’t recall what IRC even is.)
The summer between Seasons 2 and 3 was brutal. In the Season 2 finale, “And The Answer Is…,” Clark proposed to Lois, even though they hadn’t been dating very long by that point. We had to wait four months for the Season 3 premiere “We Have A Lot To Talk About” to find out what would happen next. Well… some of us did. One Krypton Club subscriber managed to get us an unfinished copy of the season premiere a month early. We then were going into the AOL chat room for the show and started reciting dialogue, and no one knew that what we were sharing was for real. Shhh. There was a FoLCFest where fans gathered; I didn’t attend that, but I did visit the studio with some friends and took a studio tour in the summer of 1995, where we were able to meet Dean Cain and Justin Whalin, and our poor tour guide is said to have gotten in big trouble for allowing us to stop and talk to them. Later in Season 3, I interviewed Executive Producer Brad Buckner for the Krypton Club Newsletter, and he invited my friends and I to hang out on the set and see some filming! The episode was “It’s A Small World After All” and it was so great to see a Lois who remembers who she is (more on that in a moment). I got to walk by in a scene, but none of my takes were used. We were able to meet the other cast members that we hadn’t met before, though we waited for the end of the to approach Teri so we wouldn’t bother her.
And about Lois remembering… Season 3 is when Lois & Clark pulled a bait and switch that the audience never really forgave the show for. In February, Lois and Clark were going to be married. Ads for the episode promoted them as if they were the best marriage since Michael & Lisa Marie, Charles & Di, Burt & Loni… all couples who had recently divorced… but those weren’t enough clues. When audiences saw what was really going on, they were mad, and it didn’t help that the clone/amnesia arc ran for about two months once reruns were factored in.
Season 4 got the characters actually married fast, but the damage was done. Even though Warner Bros. and ABC had made a deal to renew the show for Season 5, they renegotiated, and instead the network picked up a season of a different short-lived series. There was talk about TNT picking up some new episodes to get to the magic number of 100, but with Teri getting pregnant and other factors getting in the way, it was never meant to be. Some of us, as fans, wrote our own “fifth seasons” in fanfiction form. That was a lot of fun to do, and ours, at least, came out on Sunday nights just like new episodes of the series would have.
Lois & Clark was also a special series to me as it was one my father and I would watch together every week. Sadly, he passed away on May 26, 1997… only a few days after it was announced that the show was canceled. At the time, I was a bit relieved, not really wanting to be in a world where I’d be watching without him. Selfish, perhaps… but those final three episodes that ABC burned off in the summer weren’t the same without my Dad to watch with me.
I made lifelong friends from Lois & Clark, some of whom I still speak to on a regular basis. (A special shoutout goes to my friend Kat!) Fandom was much different in the pre-social media era. In many ways, it was good in that you gathered fans who all loved the same thing, and this show was special in that everyone was pretty much agreed on the preferred relationship in the series – it was in the title, and no one was shipping Lois & Dan “Plunger Boy” Scardino or something. Things did get a little less fun in Season 4 when a certain group of fans over-moderated the “WBTV forums” at the time, which is something I tried to avoid with the KryptonSite forums, not always successfully.
Dean and Teri would both guest star on Smallville and appear in multiple episodes of Supergirl, even both appearing in the same episode but not crossing paths. They say they’d like to do a reunion but I believe that about as much as I believe the Smallville animated show will actually happen. But, today belongs to the memory of the show that was – Lois & Clark… a fantastic series.
Want five episodes to check out? It’s nearly impossible to pick just five, but here we go: “Pilot” (Season 1) – “The Green, Green Glow of Home” (Season 1) – “The House of Luthor” (Season 1) – “Tempus Fugitive” (Season 2) – “We Have A Lot To Talk About” (Season 3). All are available on the MAX streaming service!