From
the minute we hear the voice of transplanted Krytponian Kara Zor-El,
a.k.a. Kara Danvers, narrating the story, we’re primed to think of the
show in terms of voices being heard, images being claimed and reclaimed.
Although its four credited “developers” (one of whom is Greg Berlanti
of the CW’s Arrow and The Flash) might be horrified to
hear the show described this way, because the word is a kiss of death
for some (mostly male) viewers, this is a feminist series that’s aware
of the cultural and political implications of everything it’s showing
us, whether it’s Kara taking issue with a prototype of a costume with a
bared midriff or defeating a brawny, hateful, openly sexist foe by,
essentially, destroying his symbolic phallus.
Kara was sent to Earth as a baby to watch over her younger cousin,
the future Superman, but got waylaid and ended up landing on Earth years
after the boy’s arrival. Now she’s trying to find her own way. She
leaves her adoptive parents (played by Dean Cain and Helen Slater, who
respectively played Superman on TV and Supergirl in a movie) and gets a
job at a big-city newspaper run by media mogul Cat Grant (Calista
Flockhart), a petite human steamroller who says things like, “It’s not
that I don’t see your frown, it’s that I don’t care enough to ask why
it’s there.” Kara dons a costume and tries out her powers for the first
time in the pilot episode, learns some secrets about her past, learns
that she has a mission; we meet supporting characters familiar from
prior incarnations of the story, including a bad guy who is essentially
an openly sexist version of General Zod named Vartox (Owain Yeoman), and
the newspaper photographer James Olsen (here played by Mehcad Brooks,
certainly the most broad-shouldered, deep-voiced, confident “Jimmy” of
all time).
All the usual origin-story beats are here, and at first it seems a
little bit sad, or perhaps just irritating, that so much of it is just
recycling the story of Superman but with a woman (all this is inherited,
by the way; it’s from the comics). But soon it becomes clear that Supergirl
is dealing in a couple of related subtexts. One is the difficulty of a
woman establishing herself as noteworthy and valuable when a man has
already done all of the things she’s capable of doing and been acclaimed
for them (the ho-hum factor). The other is how hard it is to get the
public (represented here by the newspaper’s readers) to think of Kara as
the equal of any male superhero when even her allies seem to denigrate
her, even though they don't mean to.
“I don’t want to minimize the importance of this,” Kara says, the
morning after the superheroine rescues an endangered airplane and makes
headlines around the world and is dubbed “Supergirl” by Cat. “A female
superhero. Shouldn’t she be called Superwoman? If we call her Supergirl,
something less than what she is, doesn’t it make us guilty of being
antifeminist?” Cat asks her, “What do you think is so bad about ‘girl’?
If you perceive ‘Supergirl’ as anything less than excellent, isn’t the
real problem you?”
Well, not necessarily — but it's still nice to hear these kinds of
conversations occurring on a CBS series, especially one filled with so
many iconic comic-book images and situations. It’s a gauntlet rather
brazenly thrown down to sexist fanboys — many of whom will refuse to
watch this series because it’s about a young woman who cries sometimes
and still misses her dead mother and is still learning how to be a
superhero, though of course they’ll say it’s for some other reason. The
deliberate echoing of the original 1978 Superman: The Movie
— which also let the protagonist make headlines by saving an endangered
airliner and had the bad guy demand a face-to-face meeting via
high-frequency transmissions that only superheroes and animals can hear —
feels like an especially pointed sort of provocation. It’s like the
show is flat-out saying, “Here is, literally, the story of Superman —
but with a woman. If you are automatically not interested, ask yourself
why that is.”
I don’t want to come across as unreasonably enthused about Supergirl
because CBS only saw fit to send out the pilot. There could be a
precipitous drop in quality in the next few weeks, for all we know. But
what’s onscreen here is intelligent, sensitive, and sure-footed, and
altogether promising. The show knows what it’s doing and what it’s
about.
