TV Review: "Supergirl" (TV- PG)
I want to start off by saying that I am a huge fan of superhero lore. I even convinced the maintenance staff at my parish to paint my bedroom walls alternating blue and red. So as you can probably imagine, when I hear about new superhero television shows or movies, I immediately go searching for a trailer of some sort. In the case of Supergirl, there was a leak (with much speculation) this summer with the pilot episode on the internet. I must say that the fan in me raged to go watch the leaked episode, while the moral side of me said that it would not be right to do it. Ultimately the moral side of me won out and I did not watch the leaked episode.
I must say that I am glad that I waited. The show has been amazing since the pilot episode. If I would opted not to wait, I would have been anxiously hitting the refresh button on my computer waiting for new episode information to be released (I'm actually really not that bad). You may be asking yourself by this point, "what makes this different from any other superhero TV show that has aired in the past or now?" For starters, I asked myself this question before I watched the first episode. I was a big fan of the TV show Smallville that aired from 2001 to 2011. Smallville covers the story of a young Clark Kent before he accepts his identity as Superman. Supergirl is a very different kind of show.
In the show you're introduced to a quirky young adult version of Kara (Supergirl). The quirkiness will get you to fall in love with the character almost immediately. You want to root for her success from the beginning. Like her cousin, Clark Kent, she has a job in the media industry, but she is not a reporter like Clark. The pilot makes it very easy for young adults to identify to Kara because she has a entry-level job like many young adults have right out of college. She works as an assistant for a very demanding boss and has to figure out how to balance work and life as a superhero. Additionally, she wonders who she can trust with her secret as Supergirl.
Without getting into too many details, the show excels on many levels. The characters are very realistic and very dynamic. It is refreshing to have a female superhero main protagonist as a role-model for girls and women (and men for that matter). As a viewer, you will really care about her well-being. As a priest, I was very happy to see that the focus of the show was not on making Supergirl a "sex-symbol," but rather on her as a person. She tackles many of the same issues that people go through everyday, minus the superpowers of course. She even finds herself confronting a number of moral conundrums in just about every episode (as of this writing there have been six episodes).
Bottom line: Yes I would recommend watching this TV show. It has been rated (TV-PG) for "parental guidance" due to some of the violence involved. The dialogue has been very tasteful so far as has been the content.
