Supergirl

The Gravity of Being Good

I remember exactly what the superhero vibe was in 2015: bruised, brooding, and trying so hard to be taken seriously. Everything was rain-slicked concrete and heroes who acted like their powers were a terminal diagnosis. Then *Supergirl* showed up. Built by Greg Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg, and Ali Adler, it landed on CBS (before the long move to The CW) in loud primary colors with a simple, refreshing idea: what if superpowers were actually… fun? Adler’s *Chuck* and *The New Normal* background shows in the show’s slightly goofy workplace-comedy DNA. It wasn’t here to reinvent anything. It just wanted the old thing to shine a little brighter.



The pilot’s airplane rescue nails that tension. Kara Danvers has spent more than a decade hiding her Kryptonian identity while fetching coffee for media mogul Cat Grant. But when her adoptive sister’s flight loses an engine, Kara ducks into an alley, yanks off the civilian jacket, and rockets into the night. She doesn’t float up like a deity. She shoots upward with awkward, frantic force. When she finally gets her hands under the belly of that falling Boeing 777, she *strains*. Her face twists with real pain as the metal screams against her shoulders. This isn’t a god casually redirecting a disaster—it’s a panicked twenty-four-year-old trying to win an arm-wrestling match with gravity. The sequence has weight: the plane scraping water, the heat of the burning engine practically licking at her clothes.

That physical, nervous reality is largely Melissa Benoist. She isn’t playing “a hero” as much as someone trying on the *idea* of being a hero. In the CatCo offices, she folds in on herself—shoulders slumped, chin tucked, looking up through her glasses like she’s trying to make herself smaller than she is. She brings that musical-theater earnestness from *Glee*, plus the jittery tension she showed in *Whiplash*. Benoist once said in an interview that Kara taught her strong women don’t have to be abrasive or cynical to be powerful, and you can feel that belief in the performance. When she flies, she smiles—not a smug smirk, but a huge, messy grin like she can’t believe this is really happening.



None of this means the show is flawless. The early episodes can wobble when they try to juggle cosmic alien threats with *Devil Wears Prada* office politics. The weekly villains often feel stapled on—cheap prosthetics, dialogue that sounds like it wandered in from a 1990s Saturday morning cartoon. And sometimes the political messaging is less “subtext” and more “thrown brick.” But the sincerity carries it. Hank Stuever wrote in the *Washington Post* that the series manages the tricky job of "making a corny comic-book story seem not only believable but also welcoming." I don’t think the writers always knew what to do with Kara (making her a bumbling reporter under a demanding boss can feel like a straight lift from the Clark Kent/Daily Planet setup), but the emotional core stays intact.

Calista Flockhart’s Cat Grant is the secret weapon. She prowls through those glass offices with rigid, predatory posture, firing off withering monologues that somehow turn into surprisingly solid life advice. (I’d absolutely watch a spin-off that’s just Cat running a media empire and dunking on tech billionaires.)



Sure, the show eventually balloons into a massive ensemble—multiverses, crossovers, a dizzying parade of costumed allies across six seasons. But I always circle back to those early, bright, slightly messy episodes. There’s something quietly gutsy about a superhero show that treats optimism as a decision instead of a default. Kara Zor-El is an alien refugee who lost her entire world, and she still looks at her new home and chooses to see the good. Whether that’s character depth or just network-TV formula depends on how much earnestness you can take. Either way, it’s rare to find pop culture that’s so openly trying to leave you feeling a little lighter when the hour is up.