Was… anybody looking for a TV show set on pre-Jor-El Krypton?

I mean, this isn’t necessarily bad:

Syfy today announced it has greenlit a pilot for Krypton, the Superman prequel series set two generations before the destruction of the legendary Man of Steel’s home planet. Krypton will follow Superman’s grandfather — whose House of El was ostracized and shamed — as he fights to redeem his family’s honor and save his beloved world from chaos.

…but I don’t know if anybody was actually looking for something like this, ahead of time.  Certainly it never occurred to me until I saw the article. Which may be a selling point for originality, although I suppose that Gotham is demonstrating that you can get eyeballs for prequels like this.

The one thing that I am curious about is this, though: how do you make people interested in a setting where you know that everybody dies in forty, fifty years?  I mean, sure, Kandor survives – in a bottle – but all victories and defeats might seem fleeting when the planet that they’re on is on track to crack like a mug left too long in a kiln. Not so bad when you’re writing Batman stories, but Superman is supposed to be more cheerful than that.

Welp. Guess we’ll see, huh? – Or, rather, you’ll see, and then tell me. I still don’t have cable.

7 thoughts on “Was… anybody looking for a TV show set on pre-Jor-El Krypton?”

  1. Personally, I haven’t started watching anything on SciFi (I refuse to use that stupid name they changed to) ever since they canceled Eureka and Warehouse 13.

    1. Evidently, they’ve started getting good again.
      I’ve heard raves about some of their new shows. “The Expanse” and “Dark Matter” in particular.

  2. Any bets this is written as some kind of climate change allegory? A planet full of deniers, and Grandpa El and his plucky band as the only ones keeping the faith.

  3. I got bored with the 20 minutes or so of Krypton in “Man of Steel”, and that had Russell Frickin Crowe in it. It’s always bleak, in every version I’ve ever seen. SUPERMAN SHOULD NOT BE ‘DARK AND GRITTY’, DAMMIT! Never, ever.

  4. Yeah. Gotham has also been amazingly awful, mostly, and usually pointless even when it’s not. So I don’t see the point of this series.

    “The one thing that I am curious about is this, though: how do you make people interested in a setting where you know that everybody dies in forty, fifty years?”

    Dunno. Although a start to an answer would be to ask the makers of Caprica what went wrong.

    1. Among [many] other things, Caprica went off the rails when they decided that the Cylons were infused with the personality of a petulant, entitled teenage girl. I mean I guess it explains the genocide and all, but who wanted to watch that?

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