From "Smallville" to "Gotham:" TV's Travels and Travails with Superheroes

Reb Brown played Captain America in two late-1970s TV movies: Ah, no.

Shows like “Smallville” and “Gotham” reflect the intersection of an immensely popular genre with a medium considered to be ill-suited to present that genre. Such shows necessarily try to have it both ways.

The costumed romanticism and colorful childish conventions of superhero comics do not blend well with the mundane, realistic surfaces preferred by television (even though TV's plots are anything but realistic). 

"The Bionic Woman:" TV prefers its super people sensibly dressed.

This is one of the reasons why shows about costumed characters like Spider-Man and Captain America failed so badly on 1970s TV, while normally dressed bionic super-spies and the Incredible Hulk succeeded. The Hulk was, after all, just a Universal Pictures monster writ large, coupled with the familiar TV formula of "The Fugitive." I remember a long sequence on a Spider-Man TV episode that was actually given over to a car chase — the very dullest of television conventions weighing down a character who should have soared.
Even several years earlier, in 1971, Marvel’s blind superhero Daredevil arguably became, in TV writer Stirling Silliphant’s hands, a private detective named Longstreet, played by James Franciscus. Silliphant had consulted with Stan Lee about a Daredevil TV series before he created Mike Longstreet. The character’s heightened remaining senses could pick up clues others missed, and he could fight with spectacular martial arts abilities taught to him by Bruce Lee. Dramatic radio, the theatre of the mind, was hospitable to immensely popular superheroes like the Shadow, the Lone Ranger and the Green Hornet even before the comic book variety arrived, and welcomed Superman almost as soon as he landed. Costumed characters are no dramatic obstacle when you’re the one imagining how they look. Movies, with their bigger budgets and audiences seated in the cavernous dark before a giant glowing screen, also find it easy to trade in the fantastic. But the living-room medium remains uncomfortable with anything that looks out of place in a living room. Superhero comics prefer the fantastic to look fantastic, while television prefers the fantastic to look pedestrian.