SMALLVILLE - THE COMPLETE SIXTH SEASON (2006)

Description: A meteor shower bursts from the heavens, raining destruction on the unsuspecting citizens of Smallville. Twelve years later and the healing process has left the town's inhabitants with scars and secrets. From the ashes of tragedy, a popular yet awkward teen attempts to decipher the meaning of his life and his clouded past. As he struggles with the transition from boyhood to adulthood, his strength and strange abilities set him uncomfortably apart from his peers, and his name is Clark Kent.  - Amazon.com

Part clever reinvention of the Superman mythos, part Buffy rip-off, part teenage soap opera, Smallville was never exactly 100% Superman.

Thanks to a ?no cape, no flying? rule, we never saw anything so much as red underwear being worn on top! For the first few seasons the teenaged Superman (played by the dreamy Tom Welling) battled the ?Kryptonite-mutated villain of the week? as he pined for Lana Lang in a geographic area so littered by the deadly green stuff that you'd thought he would have moved a long time ago!

By the fourth season or so the writers must have been getting bored with this recipe because the series made a sharp turn towards more comic book territory with wilder out there plot conceits such as 17th century witches, super-powered fellow Kryptonians, other DC superheroes in their teenaged personas and so forth. Lex Luthor also finally clicked that he is the bad guy after all.

Season 5 ended on a cliff-hanger with Clark/Superman banished to the Phantom Zone, Lex Luthor being possessed by the malicious spirit of evil Kryptonian named General Zod and Lana having the hots for him despite this. Season 6 promises more of the same wildness and it can be only welcomed: taken in, er, small dosages early Smallville episodes were fine. However viewed on DVD in huge dollops those early episodes come across as formulaic and predictable at times.