The most comforting superhero show out there, My Adventures With Superman, returns with an excellent two-part season 2 premiere.
As much as I enjoyed the excellent first season of My Adventures With Superman, I must admit to not thinking about it too much since it was released. Due to this, I approached season 2 with slightly lowered expectations, expecting to not feel anywhere near as enthusiastic as I did about the show when it first premiered. I mean, part of what made me fall for My Adventures With Superman in the first place was how it surprised me with its consistency and high-quality writing, and so naturally season 2 felt like it was going to suffer thanks to the standard it’s now set for itself. Consider me surprised, then, when I immediately felt myself won over again the second I heard that familiar opening theme in the season 2 premiere, and I found myself falling back in love with what continues to be one of the greatest superhero shows out there.
In a world where we have shows like Invincible (2021-) telling these massive stories with dozens of major characters and The Boys (2019-) attempting to subvert every superhero trope out there, My Adventures With Superman carves its own ground by being the genre’s equivalent of a warm, cosy blanket. It’s an incredibly likeable series, one that emphasises building characters ahead of attempting ambitious storytelling. Whilst you won’t find anything ground-breaking here, or even anything particularly emotionally affecting, what you will find is a core trio who it’s almost impossible not to fall in love with.
The way My Adventures With Superman chooses to portray its titular character (Jack Quaid) continues to impress me. He’s constantly grappling with his identity, desperate to learn more about his Kryptonian roots whilst also being scared about what those revelations will mean for his humanity. At one point in the premiere he asks Lois (Alice Lee) if it bothers her that he’s an alien. She responds by reversing the question, does it bother him that she’s human? It’s an endearing struggle, and one that makes his internal conflict between focusing on Lois’ needs versus his own all the more enticing and significantly less infuriating. We understand why he’s willing to put his own personal quests to the side in favour of helping out his girlfriend’s dad, because he worries that doing the opposite will cause her to see him as less human.
Season 2’s opening two episodes, “More Things in Heaven and Earth” and “Adventures with My Girlfriend”, do a great job setting up what’s to come, whilst at the same time not feeling like it’s overloading the show with too many new pieces. I must admit to feeling somewhat worried about how exactly the series is going to be able to juggle some of the more major plot points that it has revealed but hasn’t yet begun to fully sink its teeth into, but at the same time, there’s plenty of reason to feel confident about it.
Looking back at season 1, I can’t say I expected the show to be able to pull of a multiverse storyline, and it handled that perfectly well, so as long as they ensure that despite all the new additions to the cast, that central sense of likeability isn’t lost, then we should have nothing to worry about.
As for the plot of the two-part premiere itself, what we get is a story that positions Amanda Waller (Debra Wilson) as the show’s new central big-bad, with the second episode’s ending giving us our first proper look at who I imagine will be taking over that title during the course of the season. Waller is a great villain, especially for a Superman like the one featured in this show who’s still in his early days, because her code of ethics is almost exactly the inverse of the titular protagonist’s. Whilst the Kryptonian believes in always doing the right thing to an almost naive degree, which is what makes him so endearing, Waller believes that doing the wrong thing is always justified as long as it’s in service of what she believes is the right result. It’s hardly the most unique moral code for a villain to have, but it sets up a potentially interesting dynamic for season 2 to explore.
There’s not much that the premiere of My Adventures With Superman season 2 gets wrong, giving us plenty of reasons to be excited about the future of this series whilst also ensuring us that the creators still understand what made that first season feel like such a breath of fresh air in a tired genre. It’ll be interesting to see if the show can maintain this level of sincerity as it adds in more and more new characters and storylines, but no matter what, one thing’s for sure: it’s more than earned its chance to try.
The Season 2 Premiere (ep. 1 and 2) of My Adventures With Superman will be released on Adult Swim on May 25, 2024 at midnight, and the next day on Max.
