Really, the place where she needs as much help as Clark is parenting," he adds. But she's always presented in a way that she doesn't need Superman to come save her. She's still Lois, so she gets herself in binds sometimes. She's fighting with this person in a way where she doesn't need Superman's help. Lois kind of has her own villain, while Clark has his own villain. "From the get-go, you see how strong she is. "Lois's pen is where her strength lies," notes Helbing. But the Superman & Lois writers' room vowed that this iteration would never feel like a damsel in distress that in almost every way, she's as much of a hero as he is. Sure, past incarnations of Lois often stumbled into trouble and required rescuing. There's Lois too – and no matter the scenario, she's not one to wait on the sidelines.
#Time magazine man of the year 1938 how to#
How to keep being a good Superman and a good husband and a good father, and doing all that simultaneously, is a challenge."Ĭlark isn't the only person responsible for raising the kids, of course. Clark needs to be there, in the same way that Jonathan Kent was there for him when he was going through all the stuff he was going through as a teenager. "What's interesting is that when the show starts, the boys are now reaching this age where Superman can't be gone as much," Helbing says. But for the most part, as a parent, she's been around more than Clark is – and that weighs heavily on his mind. That means frequently being absent from home. On top of that, he's Superman: he needs to save the world whenever the world needs saving. At the beginning of the season, he still works as a journalist at the Daily Planet. The second you see Clark Kent, Superman, going through the same things as anybody in the world could go through if they are a parent, it grounds him in a way that I don't think he's ever been grounded before." Parental guidanceĬlark understandably has a lot on his plate. It added an element of intrigue and humanity. "But as a parent, we were able to take that age-old 'Clark Kent is clumsy' attribute and flip it a little bit to 'Clark is clumsy as a dad, as a parent'. "He never really messes up," Helbing adds. A lot of that is that he's a perfect version of a human. If there's one complaint about Superman, it's that he is boring.
"Smallville did a really great job of dealing with this alien kid that has to keep his powers in check while he's going through all the trials and tribulations of being a teenager," he continues. It's always emotional family stories first, and then it gets into the heroics and mythology after that.
What does that look like for them as parents? For the kids, how do we make that interesting and real? As parents, it becomes a juggling act of how you parent them and give them the individual love and guidance that they need. Lois is the most famous journalist in the world. "From the onset, once you think about Clark and Lois married and as parents, it really becomes a family show that happens to have Superman and Lois in it," Helbing explains. That little escapade inspires some heart-to-heart conversations about their priorities, careers, and raising two teenage boys – Jordan and Jonathan – who could ultimately inherit their father's Kryptonian abilities. An emergency forces the duo to travel back to Superman's hometown of Smallville.
#Time magazine man of the year 1938 series#
The series opens with Lois and Clark in Metropolis. Superman & Lois follows the titular couple as they embark on their greatest adventure to date: parenting. Lois and Clark in our show are very much Tami and Coach Taylor."
One of the analogs we use for this show is Friday Night Lights. They knocked it out of the park in all the Arrowverse episodes that they were in, but we are really diving into their relationship. There are subtle changes they make – not necessarily in performances, but in attitude. "But when I explained to them what we were trying to do and the tonal shift, they got on board pretty quickly. "It's an interesting dynamic, because Tyler and Bitsie had already played these characters in a handful of episodes and had worked on their interpretations of the characters," Helbing says. (Image credit: BBC/DC/Warner Bros Entertainment)