Superman & Lois has a key difference from Smallville that works to the show's advantage. With season 1 wrapped up and season 2 in full swing, Superman & Lois continues to follow Tyler Hoechlin's Man of Steel as he balances his life as a superhero, husband, and father. Season 2 also sees Clark Kent facing a new foe in his doppelganger Bizarro—also played by Hoechlin.
Superman & Lois is the second Superman-centric CW series, following the network's previous big DC series Smallville. Running from 2001 to 2011, Smallville focused on Clark Kent (Tom Welling) as a young man, years before his eventual transformation into Superman. Smallville began during Clark's teenage years, following him and his friends into young adulthood, and it's that characteristic that Superman & Lois flips.
Clark Kent has been Superman for twenty years already during the events of Superman & Lois. While Smallville was all about Clark's gradual journey to becoming the iconic Man of Steel, Superman & Lois takes the opposite approach—but it also does a lot more than simply flip the setup. While both shows are generally age-neutral in their audiences, they also tilt slightly towards different demographics in a way that echoes one another. Beginning with Clark in high school, Smallville started out with a slight but noticeable lean towards adolescents. As Clark's story continued, Smallville's storytelling followed suit, with the makers of the show being clearly aware that the series had an aging audience in its teenage viewers. Twenty years after the debut of Smallville, Superman & Lois picked this ball up and ran with it.
A big focus of Superman & Lois is on Clark and Lois raising their teenage sons Jordan (Alex Garfin) and Jonathan (Jordan Elsass), with Jordan struggling with Kryptonian powers. This demonstrates that Superman & Lois, while generally age-neutral, also leans slightly in the direction of married couples and parents. While not a continuation of Smallville, Superman & Lois is almost tailor-made for the young viewers who once made it popular, having grown up and started families themselves. Superman & Lois, in effect, carries over a generation of Superman fans into a new story, and does so by starting at the opposite point in Superman's life.
With an impressive 10-season run, Smallville is one of the most widely cherished Superman adaptations. Of course, it was ultimately Tom Welling's iconic portrayal of Clark Kent that gave Smallville its lasting power above all else. Tyler Hoechlin, after being an occasional Arrowverse guest star, finally would settle into his own groove on Superman & Lois as a veteran hero. Welling and Hoechlin's Clark Kents would even come face-to-face in the Multiverse crossover mini-series Crisis On Infinite Earths, Welling's Clark having retired as Superman and started a family of his own.
Their respective adventures on Smallville and Superman & Lois may start them in different places, but both Welling and Hoechlin's Supermen face many similar challenges. In the case of the latter, Superman & Lois' clever decision to lean slightly more towards the now-adult viewers who once tuned into Smallville is one of the show's most impressive tricks—and not the only Smallville parallel between them.