10 Years Ago, One Superhero Show Paved The Way For The New DCU
What if being corny and nice was the real punk rock?
Remember when all the DC superheroes on screen were dark and depressing? Ten years ago, in 2015, two years after the release of Man of Steel and one year before Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, if you were getting your DC superheroes exclusively from the movie theater, the tone, color palette, and overall vibe were dreary, bordering on stoic. This isn’t to say Zack Snyder’s vision for Batman, Superman, Aquaman, and Wonder Woman was wrong, per se, but the current, new DCU under James Gunn strikes an unapologetically upbeat tone. Even the dark turns of Peacemaker Season 2 were tempered with a ton of fun, and of course, the 2025 film Superman asserted a new basic battle cry for DC superheroes: What if being nice was the real punk rock?
And, while this all might seem like a new, swift change for live-action DC, the truth is, the foundation for a mega-popular, gee-whiz, upbeat take on DC, and people from the planet Krypton in particular, happened a decade ago. On October 26, 2015, Melissa Benoist took to the skies as Supergirl, in a TV take on the DC mythos that was even more wholesome than David Corenswet’s recent take on Superman.
Although not originally part of the shared CW Arrowverse canon, from the first moments of its pilot episode in Season 1, Supergirl is an unapologetic TV show with an incredibly cheesy premise: What if Kara Zor-El’s spaceship was just right behind baby Kal-El’s spaceship? What if a tween Kryptonian was sent to watch over her baby cousin? The idea that Kara was supposed to be Superman’s Aunt Beru, sort of watching over him, isn’t presented as silly or questionable in the opening moments of the show; it's given to the audience with plenty of melodrama, like Doctor Who exposition: breathless, hyperbolic, and heartfelt. In short, from its first minute, Supergirl wanted to make it clear that this show was going to wear its heart on its sleeve and that its eponymous heroine would be quirky, but never cynical.
As Kara, Benoist refreshingly didn’t try to make Supergirl into a snarky girlboss, but instead, imbued her performance with a “who me?” kind of relatable charm. Again, you can’t prove that David Corenswet and James Gunn took notes from this show, but Benoist’s Kara has a lot more in common with Corenswet’s Clark Kent than she does, say, Milly Alcock’s new Maid of Might. Memorably, the pilot episode gave us a scene in which Kara tries on a few different takes on her super costume, mocking the infamous crop-top supersuit, and making it clear that she simply cannot fly around in that outfit.
Supergirl doesn’t mess around.
Instead, Kara’s look ends up being an almost exact replica of what Helen Slater wore in the 1984 Supergirl movie. It’s classic, functional, and a little bit old-fashioned. If you told a new viewer of the 2015 Supergirl that the show was made in the 1990s, the only dead giveaway that it wasn’t would be cellphones. Otherwise, the show has a kind of nostalgic, almost sitcom-like quality to it, which may not look amazing now, but certainly has its heart in a particular place.
While The Flash arguably became the MVP and fan-favorite of the Arrowverse, by 2016, Supergirl ceased to be a regular CBS show and was brought into the fold of that larger shared universe. This meant that Kara’s world also came with a new Superman, Tyler Hoechlin’s Man of Steel, who would end up being the very last person to lead a CW Arrowverse show; the conclusion of Superman & Lois in 2024 represented the end of an era for these kinds of modest DC shows, the tonal opposite of a prestige Marvel Disney+ series.
Melissa Benoist at Comic-Con in 2019.
Supergirl’s soapish charm and confident optimism not only boosted the roster of heroes in the CW’s pantheon, but it also gave this shared DC universe a kind of alternative to the darker version of Kryptonian heroes on the big screen. And the sheer popularity of Benoist’s Kara served as a kind of early geek culture barometer. The world did crave happy superheroes. As it turns out, kindness combined with earnestness and a bit of humor never really goes out of style.
