It’s been over fifteen years since Clark Kent hung up his red and blue for the final time on Smallville, and yet here we all are, still talking about it. Still rewatching it. Still arguing about whether the show needed ten seasons or whether seven would’ve done just fine (I have thoughts, but that’s a different post). What I find most interesting about Smallville isn’t just the show itself, but the orbit around it. The tributes. The “what if” conversations fans never stopped having. The moments that, even now, get clipped and shared and quoted because they just worked.

So today I want to take a lap through Smallville‘s fan culture. Not the episode-by-episode stuff I usually do on Tuesdays in my Rewatching series, but the bigger picture. The legacy. The way this show keeps finding new ways to matter to the people who loved it.

The Reeve Connection

If you want to understand why Smallville mattered to people who grew up on the Christopher Reeve Superman films, you don’t need to look much further than Reeve’s own reaction to the show. He went on record saying he was a little skeptical going in, but came away impressed by the writing, the acting, and what the show was able to pull off on a weekly television budget. He specifically called out how far special effects had come since 1977, and said the series was doing a good job staying true to the mythology, with Tom Welling carrying on the tradition he himself had taken up decades earlier.

That’s not just a nice quote. Reeve went a step further and made two guest appearances on the show before his passing in 2004, which meant the literal Superman was, in some sense, passing a torch on screen. His appearances were filmed in New York City rather than Vancouver, and his presence in season two’s “Rosetta” carried extra weight because Mark Snow’s score for that episode reworked John Williams’s original Superman theme from the Krypton sequence. So you’ve got the original Superman actor, sharing a story with the new one, scored with a callback to the original film’s music. That’s the kind of layered tribute that fans pick up on immediately, and it became one of the most emotionally resonant threads running through the early seasons.

Years later, the Ultimate Smallville Soundtrack box set (a five-disc collection released in 2013 featuring 100 songs from the show’s ten seasons) had all of its profits go to the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. So even after the show ended, the connection to Reeve’s legacy kept showing up in how Smallville chose to give back.

The Crisis Crossover

For a long time, Smallville existed in its own bubble. The show wrapped in 2011, and aside from the Season 11 digital comic continuing the story, that was largely it. Then in late 2019, Tom Welling and Erica Durance stepped back into Clark Kent and Lois Lane for the Arrowverse’s massive “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover event.

This wasn’t a quick cameo for nostalgia’s sake either. The crossover retroactively established that everything we watched across Smallville‘s ten seasons took place on a specific Earth within the multiverse (Earth-167), and it depicted a Clark who had given up his powers entirely, settled down on the Kent farm, and was raising two daughters with Lois. For longtime fans, that was a huge deal. It gave Smallville‘s open-ended finale a kind of epilogue, one that suggested Clark chose a quiet life over a cape, at least for a while.

There’s an interesting wrinkle here too. While discussing an earlier Smallville episode called “Persona” in 2025, Welling gave some context for how Clark could have given up his powers by the time of the crossover. In Smallville‘s universe, Blue Kryptonite has the effect of stripping a Kryptonian of their abilities for as long as they’re exposed to it, and “Persona” featured a character wearing a piece of Blue Kryptonite in a bracelet for exactly that purpose. Welling suggested Clark was using something similar by the time of the Crisis crossover. It’s a small detail, but it’s the kind of connective tissue that fans love piecing together, linking a one-off plot device from years earlier to a much bigger story being told in a completely different show.

Michael Rosenbaum was approached about returning as Lex Luthor for the crossover, but he passed. According to Rosenbaum, Warner Bros. didn’t show him a script or tell him what his character would actually be doing, and he wasn’t given a filming schedule either, despite it being implied within the crossover that Lex had become President. Alan Ritchson, who played Aquaman in Smallville, was also approached but turned the offer down due to scheduling conflicts with Titans. He did still show up in the crossover, but as his Titans character Hank Hall, appearing through archival footage rather than as Aquaman.

The crossover ends with the birth of a new multiverse, and Smallville‘s Earth-167 doesn’t appear in the montage of new realities shown on screen. But it’s not entirely erased either. In a later episode of Titans, Beast Boy travels the new multiverse and the audience hears (without seeing) different universes represented through archival audio, including a moment where Dr. Fate simply says that Clark’s fate is “binding.” For a show that spent ten seasons building toward Clark becoming Superman, that’s a strangely fitting final word.

The Animated Revival That Refuses to Die (Or Be Born)

If there’s one piece of Smallville news that fans have been chewing on for years now, it’s the on-again, off-again animated continuation that Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum have been trying to get off the ground since 2021.

The pitch, as described by Welling, would pick up right after Smallville‘s finale and tell its own continuing story, with as many original cast members as possible involved. John Glover, Sam Jones III, Kristin Kreuk, and Erica Durance were all reportedly on board, along with original showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. Allison Mack was the notable exception, given the sex trafficking charges brought against her, for which she was later convicted and imprisoned.

Welling and Rosenbaum delivered their pitch to Warner Bros. in January 2022. And then… not much happened. In the years since, both actors have talked about the project on their Talk Ville podcast and in various interviews, and the honest answer has consistently been that Warner Bros. simply hasn’t responded. Co-creator Al Gough has pointed to the studio’s focus on the new big-screen Superman as a likely reason the Smallville continuation has stayed on the back burner.

What I find genuinely touching about this whole saga is how low-key the actors have kept their expectations. Welling has described the project as fan-driven rather than something aimed at being a financial windfall, framing it more as “we all like working together, and if we could do it, it’d be fun” than as a big corporate strategy. That’s a very Smallville way to look at it, honestly. The show was never really about scale. It was about these characters and the people who played them, and the fact that the actors still want to tell more of their story, even years later, says a lot about what the experience meant to them.

Iconic Moments That Defined the Show

Smallville ran for ten seasons and 217 episodes, which is an enormous amount of story to cover, but a few series-defining elements stand out as the things fans point back to again and again.

“Save Me” and the Opening Theme

Remy Zero’s “Save Me” became so synonymous with Smallville that it’s almost impossible to separate the two. What’s interesting is that the song wasn’t originally intended as the show’s theme at all. During the first two seasons, the closing-credits music composed by Mark Snow was actually being considered as the eventual theme, and it leaned more heroic and “in-your-face.” By season two, producers decided that approach no longer fit where the show had gone, and Snow created a more melodic, toned-down score for the closing credits instead, while “Save Me” remained the opening. In 2002, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers recognized both Snow and Remy Zero for their contributions, an award given to those who wrote the theme or underscore for the highest-rated show on their network that year.

The Meteor Shower Origin

The decision to bring Clark to Earth via a devastating meteor shower wasn’t just a way to explain his arrival. It was built into the DNA of the entire series. That meteor shower became the source of meteor-infected “freaks” that powered the early villain-of-the-week format, it killed Lana Lang’s parents (which shaped her entire arc and her connection to Clark), and it set Lex Luthor down the dark path that would eventually turn him into Clark’s greatest enemy. Warner Bros. Television president Peter Roth specifically appreciated how this tied Clark’s arrival directly to the pain it caused the people around him, and that tension between Clark’s gifts and the cost of his presence ran through the show for years.

The “No Tights, No Flights” Rule

This is probably the single most quoted piece of Smallville trivia, and for good reason. Series creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar built the entire show around the idea that Clark wouldn’t wear the suit or fly during the series, stripping Superman down to what they called his “bare essence” and asking what actually shaped him into that person. Tom Welling stuck to this rule throughout his time on the show. It’s also the rule that the show eventually had to bend, slowly, as Clark’s powers and destiny became unavoidable, which is part of why the final stretch of seasons felt like such a tonal shift from where the series started.

The Jonathan Kent Farewell

John Schneider’s exit as Jonathan Kent, dying of a heart attack on the night of his election victory in the show’s 100th episode, remains one of the most emotionally heavy moments in the series. According to Schneider, Jonathan was the kind of father who was “perfectly willing to go to jail, or worse,” to protect his son, and that died-protecting-the-secret framing made his death land as the culmination of everything the character had stood for since the pilot.

Christopher Reeve’s Guest Appearances

I touched on this above, but it’s worth calling out again on its own as one of the show’s most iconic moments simply because of what it represented. Having the actor most associated with Superman appear on screen with the actor who would go on to define the role for a new generation wasn’t just stunt casting. It felt like a passing of the torch, and fans still talk about those episodes as some of the most meaningful in the entire run.

Why Fans Keep Coming Back

What strikes me, looking at all of this together, is that Smallville‘s fan culture isn’t really built around the finale or even around any single season. It’s built around connective threads. A song that became the show’s identity almost by accident. A meteor shower that quietly shaped a decade of storytelling. A guest appearance that linked two eras of Superman. A crossover years later that gave the ending a quiet epilogue. And a still-unfinished pitch for more, kept alive by actors who clearly never stopped caring about these characters.

Smallville was never the flashiest superhero show, and it definitely had its rough patches (we’ll get to plenty of those in future Rewatching posts). But it built something that’s stuck around far longer than its ten-season run, and honestly, as someone who’s spent a lot of time rewatching this show lately, I don’t think that’s an accident. There’s something about Smallville, Kansas that people just don’t want to leave behind.

What’s the Smallville moment that’s stuck with you the most? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear what other fans consider the defining moments of the show.