How much do I love SUPERGIRL? Let me count the ways.

[swan_tower]

You know how there are those shows that are kind of structurally or ideologically broken, but you sort of don’t care because the banter is so good?

Supergirl is kind of the opposite of that. On a script level, it’s pretty mediocre; the dialogue often clunks and the characterization can be inconsistent and the plots rarely have clever solutions. But I find myself just not caring, because it’s doing so many other things to make me happy. It is the candy-colored cheerful superhero show that I wanted The Flash to be for me, without all the problems that made me bounce out of that one.

Case in point: the first season of The Flash basically had two female characters, Iris and Caitlin. Neither of them was particularly interesting; Caitlin’s plot revolved around her dead boyfriend and Iris was a pawn, lied to for no good reason by her best friend, infantilized by her father, rarely if ever given a chance to affect the story in a meaningful way. Supergirl, by contrast, is so stuffed with women they’re coming out at the seams. This is not one of those shows with a central female character and then a bunch of dudes. You have Alex Danvers, Supergirl’s adopted sister (and if you love rock-solid sister relationships, dear god this is the show for you); Cat Grant, her prickly and influential boss; Astra, her aunt and antagonist; Allura, her mother, appearing in both flashback and computer simulation; Lucy Lane, Lois’ younger sister and Jimmy Olson’s ex, who the show is smart enough to give a role to beyond “Jimmy Olson’s ex”; the villains Livewire and Indigo and Silver Banshee, who all play a role in more than one episode; Eliza, Alex’s mother and Kara’s foster-mother, a biologist who nerds out when she meets another alien; Miranda Crane, a senator with anti-alien views; they even have the (offstage) president be a woman (and if the show’s writers weren’t thinking about Hillary Clinton, I’ll eat my laptop). These women talk to each other. They talk to each other so much that they get to have nearly every kind of relationship; they’re family and friends and rivals and co-workers and mentors and allies and enemies. (Not lovers, though — I can’t recall any lesbian relationships, at least not in the first season.)

The show is overtly feminist, too. I wouldn’t call it a triumph of complexity in that regard — see above comments about the writing being not all that good — but from time to time it goes straight at the familiar issues, the way that women’s achievements get downplayed relative to men’s, the way that women are held to standards men don’t have to meet. Clark Kent is an offstage presence, only appearing briefly a couple of times (and then always in silhouette), or conversing with Kara in text messages. In this canon, Kara was supposed to be the protector for her younger cousin, but circumstances caused her to arrive on Earth years later and younger than him; the growth of Kara from feeling like she’ll never live up to Kal-El’s reputation and achievements to someone who wins his praise and respect is really satisfying.

AND LET’S TALK ABOUT THE ETHICS. As in, this show has some. You may recall that ethical failings are a big part of why I wound up noping out of The Flash; I just about punched the air when this show made a point of addressing those issues. You literally get one of the characters telling Kara that due process and human rights matter, and that running a “secret Guantanamo” (actual phrase from the dialogue) is 100% not okay. And Kara acknowledges this! And then they do something about it! I called Astra an antagonist; I chose that word instead of “villain” because her situation isn’t black-and-white, and the show is capable of acknowledging that she’s pursuing good ends via bad means. There’s another antagonist in a similar position, too. I love that kind of thing, and seeing it here makes me really happy.

It still has shortcomings on a higher-than-script level, mind you. The racial diversity is just barely better than token, and queer representation is basically absent. And while the show nods in the direction of the problems posed by having superpowered people around, it doesn’t really delve into them. But I can watch it and have fun without constantly being frustrated, which is exactly what I was hoping for. And every so often it rises above itself with some really good dialogue or a great plot development — which leaves me hopeful that season two will improve on the first.

Behind the cut there be spoilers!

Okay, so first off, let me talk about how much I love Alex.

I love that she is competent, and that she is genuinely important to Kara; as in Jessica Jones, the adoptive sister relationship is hands-down the most prominent one in the story, above and beyond any bonds of blood or romance. I really enjoyed how the show played out the whole business with Astra’s death: Alex made two serious attempts to tell Kara, then flinched away for a time, then — instead of having the truth get blown into the open inadvertently — she actually confessed, in a manner I found genuinely affecting (the whole “I lied because I can’t lose you” aspect). They’re not entirely without issues with each other; it’s clear that having an alien for your sister, one you’re constantly told to look after, is less than an ideal way to grow up. But those issues don’t stop them from loving one another very deeply.

It also struck me, during the “Manhunter” flashback, how much I love Alex’s look as a character. In the flashback she looks like Generically Pretty White Actress #71: hair fashionably styled, makeup conventional, dress attractive, etc. In the present day, she looks like an individual: hair cut short and simple, makeup minimal, clothing functional. And on the topic of clothes, I’m 99% certain they do for Supergirl the same thing they do for a lot of male superheroes, which is to build padding into the costume to make their muscles larger and more defined. She has shoulders in that outfit. (And her stuntwoman Jessie Graff is COMPLETELY AWESOME.)

Cat’s characterization is probably the most inconsistent on the show; I know they’re aiming to give her layers, but the failure mode of layers is a muddle, and sometimes she’s a muddle. But at the start I expected her to be the bitchy opposition to Supergirl, and instead she’s the prickly-but-inspiring role model and provocation to grow. AND SHE FIGURED IT OUT. Kara didn’t blow her secret identity in some obvious way; Cat just looked at what was in front of her and did the math. Sure, they tricked her into believing she’d gotten it wrong — but that doesn’t change the fact that she got it right, all on her own brain power. This is one of my absolute favorite things that can happen in a superhero story, and I hope Cat eventually gets to know that she was right the first time around.

I really enjoy the way they handled Hank Henshaw. The whole “I think he killed my father” thing was very conventional; turning it around into “he’s actually a shapeshifting alien who tried to save my father and wound up impersonating the guy who killed him and being a better person than the real Henshaw ever was” is way more complex and interesting. (Especially since his eyes glow red, which is standard shorthand for Evil Villain. Nope, this one’s a good guy . . . though sometimes he does have to work at it.) Ditto Maxwell Lord — am I the only one who ships him with Alex? The end of S1 seemed more like they might be aiming at a Max/Cat relationship, but Max and Alex have a really good “suspicious occasional allies” dynamic that hits my buttons pretty solidly. And as with Astra, he’s not so much a villain as an antagonist. He’s like a toned-down Lex Luthor, worried about the threat aliens like Supergirl potentially pose toward humanity, but not so much so that he assumes they can only ever be enemies.

They’ve handled the love geometry of the show pretty decently so far. Winn doesn’t carry his torch for Kara too far; when she rebuffs him, he moves on. (To Siobhan, which admittedly doesn’t turn out very well, but the point is that he doesn’t fixate on Kara.) The situation between James and Lucy is nicely realistic, with the multi-layered issues around Superman and Supergirl and the problem ultimately just being that the two of them don’t mesh quite right — and although Lucy is somewhat bitter toward Kara/Supergirl, they have a dynamic that goes beyond “bitchy and jealous girlfriend/ex,” which is the usual failure mode of those setups. The Kara-and-James relationship has been pleasingly sensible instead of pointlessly dramatic . . . and it’s been just a thing happening on the side, rather than the central, driving force of the story, as if women’s stories have to always be about romance first.

AND THEN THERE’S BARRY.

Oh my god do I ship the two of them, to the point where I’m so sad they don’t exist on the same show (or even the same Earth, but that’s a more surmountable problem). The crossover ep where he shows up is hands-down the best of the entire season, and one of the most adorable things I’ve seen all year. From both of them being crestfallen that the other one has never heard of them to Kara’s you’re-my-new-best-friend glee when Barry proves his speed by fetching everybody ice cream in two seconds flat, from all the “huh, you’ve got a villain like that, too?” moments to the “you’re an alien, that’s SO COOL” reaction, from the two of them scampering off to stuff their faces with ten thousand calories a day to them keeping up with one another at Mach Whatever — WALL-TO-WALL ADORABLE. Barry’s line about “let’s settle this like women” — Kara stares at him — “What? There’s more of you than me.” Fully 50% of Cat’s lines when he’s around: mocking the Flash moniker as sounding like a sex offender, saying the group of them look like the racially diverse cast of a CW show, figuring out who Barry is in no time flat. I seriously just want to go back and re-watch that episode now, it is that glee-inducing. It even makes me want to give The Flash another try, on the ever-so-faintly optimistic premise that Barry showing the National City police how to build cells to hold metahumans in an above-board fashion means he’s dismantled his own Basement Gitmo back home.

Anyway. I could keep burbling, but I’ve gone on for quite a while already. Given how ground down I’ve felt by the nonstop parade of police procedurals, though (where the heroes are always batting cleanup after something awful, instead of heading it off at the pass), I am so delighted to have something genuinely cheerful and good-hearted to watch.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.