“Krypton” Producer Explains Show’s Point
We have ten seasons of “Smallville,” so why does a show like Syfy’s “Krypton” need to exist? After all, a story about Superman’s grandfather and his time on the planet Krypton doesn’t seem like something that would be in high demand.
It’s a question showrunner Cameron Welsh says he understands why people have asked that, but here the opportunity is to look at a world that hasn’t really been explored in the comics or other formats much. He tells
Comicbook.com:
“I don’t know if it’s necessarily the same with Gotham, but there’s probably this notion that part of the audience goes, ‘Krypton, I guess that’s the show about the planet that Superman came from and that planet blows up so I kind of know how that story ends. Do I really need to watch this? I’ve lots of other things to do’.
So the way we’ve sought to address that challenge is that in story and this is where, when we talk about DC’s involvement, not only in giving us access to everything we’ve got but Geoff Johns himself has been a part of the show and he’s a brilliant mind and has some brilliant ideas and very early on we talked about exactly that problem, about the prequel concern.
The way we’ve addressed it in story, we have Adam Strange comes from present-day Earth, arrives on Krypton to deliver this warning to Seg to let him know that history as we know it is under threat and somebody is coming to try and change the course of history, change the timeline, and prevent Superman’s birth. The show very quickly goes from being about this look into the past into a show that has stakes in the present day.
We haven’t really seen much of this world before and it’s just this open book and allows us to tell a story that hasn’t been told. There’s still plenty more Superman stories to tell, but there’s already been a ton of those and there will continue to be.
Here’s a fresh opportunity to tell this — to explore a part of the DC universe which is super important, and it’s relatively unexplored. It’s less about not having Superman but more about it being a prequel is something that we’ve discussed as being a challenge that we face.”