I watched a YouTube video on Smallville recently, and one of the complaints about the show of course was that there was "soooo much filler". It's kinda funny coming back to Smallville discourse after spending years in the Anime Community where "Filler" has a mostly different meaning.
When I look back on Smallville comparing it to the modern state of Superhero TV shows, the "Filler" is exactly what I miss. To me what makes Clark Superman is how he deals with small things as much as the big things.
If you follow the discourse among actual DC and Marvel Comic Book readers, you'll notice one thing that has been lamented about the state of Superhero comics for well over a decade now is how everything is "written for the Trade" and thus you don't get simple short one off stories anymore, not in the main continuity at least.
Well Superhero based TV is finally catching up to the Comics in this regard. And while for now everyone is excited about the possibilities, I feel like the one person noticing that this is leading to exactly why so many of us Comic Book Nerds started preferring TV and Cartoons to the actual Comics in the first place.
Saying Smallville was good actually may be mildly controversial, but saying that about Batman The Animated Series is not. Michael Baily has lamented how since The Joker killed Robin and crippled Barbara Gordon in the late 80s you can't just tell one off Joker stories anymore, not in the main continuity, he became too big for that. In the 90s BTAS became the source for new short one off Joker stories. And it did the same for all of the villains.
The reason none of the modern attempts at creating new Batman villains have truly become Icons like the ones who've been around since at least the 70s is because those classic villains had who they are and what works about them defined by tons of short and simple one off villain of the week stories. Then later writers started trying to find ways to make them work in more Epic and long form stories with varying degrees of success. But now every new villain is introduced as the Big Bad of a huge status quo shaking event, and they may have worked great for that event, but attempts to bring them back just reveal their short comings.
It's not just the Superhero genre though. Perhaps with something like a High School Drama it's harder to easily tell the difference between something episodic and something trying to be a 20 hour movie. But I can still sense that I generally prefer the former to the latter.
For hour long live action TV shows my ideal is somewhere between purely episodic and every episode being a huge earth shattering plot development. I want there to be an overarching storyline in the background, but for most individual episodes to work as their own stand alone stories. That was how Buffy/Angel, Xena and Smallville operated back in the day. and it used to be that was also how most long running TV Anime worked.
Now it seems like if a new show did what I like it would be viewed as a step backwards. I look at how Netflix's Daredevil was praised from season 1 as a new evolution of the Superhero genre making everything that came before and contemporary with it look amateur in comparison. But all I see is how the potential for interesting one off stories with a Superhero who's also a Defense Attorney were squandered by the obsession with making a 13 hour Kingpin movie. Season 2 I liked more then most people in-spite of not doing what I prefer, then season 3 won back the season 1 people and I hated it.
And even with Anime what I like is becoming rarer, with Light Novel and Visual Novel adaptations dominating the market. And Manga meanwhile hasn't had the same history as Marvel and DC Comics, they were always "written for the trade" to some extent. So it's mostly original Anime, or Anime that diverted from the source material in ways purists hate like classic Sailor Moon and FMA that are structured the way I most prefer. The later of those mostly isn't allowed anymore, and even original Anime are often written for the Binge watcher even if it aired weekly since most Anime don't make their profits from the TV broadcast anyway.
I love plenty of shows that aren't structured this way, I'm simply sad that this kind of TV is dying out.
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