A little more than 25 years ago, on Oct. 16, 2021, “Smallville” premiered on The WB. Created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, and based on the DC Comics character, the show set out to do something that’s now common practice but was then novel: tell the origin story of an iconic character, enriching the character’s mythology along the way. On the show, an immediate hit for the network, Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum played, respectively, a high-school-aged Clark Kent and his eventual nemesis Lex Luthor in the fictional town of Smallville, Kansas. One of the inventions of “Smallville” is that Clark (who yearns to be ordinary) and Lex (who lives under the thumb of his controlling zillionaire father) are, for a time, best friends, before the inevitable happens, as Lex succumbs to his darker instincts.
\n\n“I felt like I had the liberty to just do what I wanted to do, and be real, and grounded,” Rosenbaum said in a recent interview. “I mean, seeing Lex and Clark as friends — and then obviously we know what happens with the relationship, but I thought it was really fascinating. It had never been done.”
\n\nAs opposed to their characters, Welling and…
Original source: https://variety.com/