Superman has been the most interesting when he’s on TV

Los Angeles Times

"Superman is naturally at home in the comics, and the movies generate the most money and buzz — Richard Donner’s lighthearted 1978 Superman put the character back on the national stage and made a star of Christopher Reeve, who played him three more times," says Robert Lloyd. "But the character has perhaps been most interesting on television. Superhero movies are big and expensive and don’t come along every day — it’s part of what makes them movies — while a single season of a CW series is as long as half a dozen Zack Snyder director’s cuts. Budgets being what they are, TV shows depend more on talking than action, which deepens character even when nothing crucial is being said; films may suggest relationships, but series embody them, over weeks and years, in actual people: ABC’s Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, with Teri Hatcher and Dean Cain in the title roles, which premiered in 1993, the year of Sleepless in Seattle, was three parts romantic comedy to one part sci-fi. (It took some cues from the Reeves films.) Superman and Lois is a relatively naturalistic family drama, set in Smallville, with the saga’s central couple the parents of teenagers. Television has room to wander a little, to mix in moments of behavior and banter. Even a show with as little character development as the non-serial The Adventures of Superman, which first brought the character to television in 1952 and ran for six seasons, acquired a patina of reality, a goofball gravitas, just by showing up week after week. George Reeves’ Superman, Noel Neill‘s Lois Lane (replacing Phyllis Coates in year two), Jack Larson’s Jimmy Olsen and John Hamilton’s Perry White make a family — you feel this even from a few episodes. Like Seinfeld, if Kramer came in through the wall and Jerry left jumping through the window."