Five Things The CW Has To Do To Fix The Show Supergirl

The headline clearly states that I think the TV show Supergirl needs to be fixed. While it was a popular show during its first season on CBS, it wasn’t popular enough to keep it from being shuffled to CW, the network CBS shares with Warner Bros. Television.

That is where Supergirl‘s second season will debut this Fall, and it is going to be deeply integrated into the existing CW roster of DC superhero shows, The Flash, Arrow and their spin-off Legends of Tomorrow. And that is where it will either be fixed or continue to lose viewers like me, who simply couldn’t take the awful writing of the first season.

Here are my suggestions on what needs fixing and how to do it, in reverse order of importance. Oh, and SPOILER ALERT for one huge spoiler if you plan to watch the first season before season two starts.

Fix the stunt fighting
In the pilot, the stunt fighting between Supergirl and her opponents was pretty good. Not so much once the series started in earnest. And it isn’t so bad between any two human opponents (although still not even up to Legends of Tomorrow levels), but fights between Supergirl and her opponents are often clumsy — and not because of star Melissa Benoist. It frequently looks like the stunt actor opposite her has been told to ease up by the insurance companies. And before anyone says it, I don’t think it has anything to do with her being a woman. Certainly the fights with either Black Canary in Arrow (or White Canary as Caity Loitz is called in Legends of Tomorrow) are realistic and exciting — nobody is holding back because either Loitz or the other Black Canary Katie Cassidy are “girls” in those Berlanti productions.

Fix the CGI
Since Supergirl is a Berlanti Productions effort like the other CW superhero shows, it shares almost all the same visual effects people as The Flash. Yet somehow The Flash, which supposedly has a smaller overall budget than Supergirl did, has more than double the number of visual effects people credited in IMDb.com. That allows it to make a believable giant human-shark hybrid (King Shark), whereas Supergirl couldn’t even pull off a decent tornado that allows an android to fly (Red Tornado).

Fix the plot
One thing that Supergirl seemed to have early on was a good overall season-spanning plot involving exiled Kryptonians, including her aunt Astra, the twin of Kara Zor-El’s mom. But that plotline became mired in the mess that was Supergirl’s relationship with the DEO, and with her main human opponent Maxwell Lord. By the end of the season there was no clear “final boss” opponent and that made the season less exciting than it could and should have been. Relying mostly on the “villain of the week” mode without advancing the over-arching villain story line gets repetitive — even more so than the “villain of the season” formula that works well at Berlanti’s other CW shows. If it wasn’t for the reveal of David Harewood as J’onn J’onzz, the larger plot line would have been mostly under-utilized.

Fix the scripting
Logic plot holes are nothing new for superhero shows and that has been one of my major complaints about the otherwise solid show The Flash — OK, that and terrible junk science in its science fiction elements. Supergirl has The Flash beaten hands down in this area, particularly in how she conveniently doesn’t think to use one of her many powers when it would be the perfect solution. Using her abilities to their fullest only when driven to extremes, like the abandonment rage she expressed when burning Red Tornado up with her heat vision, is trite and can’t really be used more than once. (As an aside, that led to perhaps the best episode of the series, when her overuse of the heat vision temporarily caused her to lose her powers and she was basically just human.) Stop counting on creating drama by making your main character too dumb to remember she has freezing breath or heat vision.

Fix the dialogue
Dear sweet Lord, is the dialogue in Supergirl awful. At least, any of the dramatic tension-building dialogue in any aspect that involves her being a superhero. Her interactions with Cat Grant are actually often wonderful, and her relationship with her sister Alex, played by Chyler Leigh, is perhaps the most realistically written one in the whole show. But when Supergirl moves into the superhero stuff, nobody says anything that is either believable for the character, or believable for anyone over the age of 13.

Seriously, the show is written worse than the worst “middle-schooler is really a world-saving hero” anime I’ve ever watched. I understand that Supergirl is not intended to be the level of dark drama that is the trademark of Arrow, but that doesn’t mean that the dialogue has to be horrible when establishing the show’s own drama. The anime Love Live! School Idol Project is as lightweight a story you can get, and every bit of dramatic dialogue in that show is light years more believable (and consistent to the character) than anything in Supergirl. For a domestic, live action example you don’t need to go any further than Gilmore Girls — or Smallville, for that matter. Smallville certainly had its own problems with writing, mainly brought about by drawing out the show for probably three (OK, four) seasons too many. But the character-driven drama was usually solid, from the human-to-human level to the superheroic.

I really wanted to like Supergirl, when it was announced and after the pilot episode. I would have even settled for tolerating it. But it rapidly became completely unwatchable (to the extent that I thought the astoundingly good Harewood was actually making fun of his role, his lines were so bad). I hope that Berlanti Productions can right the ship now that the show has left the mainstream influence of CBS and joined its extended family at the CW.