I finished season 1 of the CW's new DC show most recently and I was pretty surprised that it was better than I thought it would be.  I never watched Smallville back in the day, and in general the big name superhero shows don't attract me these days.  The premise of the show, at least from the trailer, was that Superman and Lois, and their two kids, move back to Smallville to live the simple life (m'eh), but the show was so much more. The show (despite the superheroness of it all) deals with big social issues. Clark gets laid off from the Daily Planet, big corporations are taking over small farms in Smallville, people are losing their livelihoods, and smaller news organizations are getting gobbled up by major conglomerates that don't care about news.  In this environment you have Zod come back.  I mean, can we have a series where Zod is absent? ;-) All in all, I am looking forward to season 2.

Alias

For the longest period of time I had been wanting to watch Alias. I don't know why, but I was getting a Mission Impossible vibe from the series back in the day and I've always wanted to see it. I stumbled on it on Tubi during the pandemic, so I thought I'd give it a try.  Sort of like Lost, it disappointed.  The series follows Sydney Bristow, a CIA agent who is undercover as an agenda for SD6.  SD6 is part of one of those global evil-doer organizations, but the people working for them don't necessarily know that.  Back when this was airing on ABC I really liked some of the SD6 folks who ended up joining the CIA.

Season 1 wasn't that bad.  I think that once the SD6 plot gets resolved in some sense, former bad guys go to work for the CIA, there are various artefacts of immorality and someone has been prophecied to find them and do something with them (presumably Sydney), and the series goes from a spy series to something a little more supernatural. I think the most ridiculous thing was putting Sydney in the field, doing her martial arts while she is quite visibly super pregnant. Why not let other cast members come in and shine?  Or is this part of Sydney's uber-soldier persona?  Overall, this was a bit of a disappointment, even though I liked individual actors throughout the series.

When Netflix announced that they were killing off their Marvel lineup I had caught up to everything except Jessica Jones Season 3. I then put the series aside and totally forgot about it. Since I had it in my Netflix queue, it came up periodically, so I decided to watch it and see what I was missing.

The season started off with a bit of a slow burn, introducing Trish as another vigilante, and seeing her ascend the physical and mental requirements needed for any mere mortal to do all that vigilante parkour.  The brilliance of the season is that build up the season finale where you get to see that when you're a vigilante there is fine line between being the "good guy" and being the "bad guy" - which Trish realized at the end of the final episode.

It's too bad that Netflix and Disney couldn't figure this out.  I really liked the four Marvel shows on Netflix (yes, even the Iron Fist).