Stargirl is the latest superhero to take flight
With superhero shows a dime a dozen these days, you seek out elements of the unique, original, creative- something that gives us a little something extra in a landscape dominated by formula for so many of these shows. And yet, in spite of that, DCU’s Stargirl is proof that you can do something familiar and yet stellar, and is a warmhearted, welcome diversion from this summer of pandemic anxiety and existential crisis.
Brec Bassinger is Stargirl herself, 15-year-old Courtney Whitmore, whose mother Barbara (Amy Smart) has recently re-married and is now moving her from California to Blue Valley, Nebraska with her new stepdad and stepbrother. That stepdad is mechanic Pat Dugan, played in a very welcome return to the screen by the impossibly amiable Luke Wilson. Almost as soon as the blended family sets foot in Blue Valley, which is a throwback to a kind of picture perfect 1950’s era slice of Americana, trouble looms in the form of a group of supervillains hiding in plain sight, the Injustice Society of America.
Courtney quickly figures out that Pat has a secret past as a sidekick in the Justice Society of America, a team of superheroes who were annihilated by the Injustice Society, and quickly rallies to take over the mantle of the JSA and lead a new generation of teen heroes, each of whom takes the place of one of the original group. She herself becomes Stargirl after finding the magical, cosmic staff of Starman, and now she can fly and fight and thankfully, has her own sidekick in Pat, who refuses to let her go it alone and builds a giant robot destructor to come along for the ride. Creator and showrunner Geoff Johns (whose original comic was a tribute to his late sister) infuses the show with equal parts nostalgia, lighthearted energy and a sense of adventure- the setting is an obvious tribute to the Hill Valley of Back to the Future, along with the tone.
A daddy-daughter crimefighting duo
Although the ISA is a real threat and lives are taken, the show never gets too dark and the atmosphere is genuinely family friendly, with the key relationship the growing father-daughter bond between Pat and Courtney. You see it coming a mile away and yet it still works, with the show never straying too far from the family drama, fully integrating Barbara and little brother Mike into the process by the very satisfying season finale. There are beats in the usual superhero tropes that show up here, from the training of the new heroes to the discovery of costumes and names and powers with Courtney’s group of teen recruits, and you know that defeating the ISA has to happen in the end. And yet, the characters take center stage and the limited number of episodes and big budget given to the show by DCU elevates everything a certain step above the usual formula.
Which brings us to the very disturbing future- with DCU in the process of being folded into HBO Max and the fate of every original DCU series in question, the CW, which re-aired this show every week over summer in light of its dearth of original programming thanks to the pandemic shutdowns, has offered to take the whole thing off WB’s hands, which they’ve readily agreed to. So now Stargirl becomes a CW exclusive show with a gutted budget and all that comes with it- aside from highly depleted special effects, expect a slashed cast (since they’ve got to keep the essential Luke Wilson around), severely restricted and reused sets, no more 4K cameras and episodes now written for network commercial breaks instead of ad free cable streaming. None of this bodes well for what was a high quality series, and I say that as someone who does watch a bunch of CW shows. The best of them just barely clear a bar much, much lower than this one sets. I weep for its fate, but hey- at least we’ll always have Season 1.
Grade: B+
Let’s hope the success of Season 1 is not strangled out existence by the CW, its new home
