Okay, let’s just get this out of the way: It is annoying that her name is Supergirl.
There is a lot to like about the new CBS series, Supergirl, which premiered Monday night. Anchored by a winning, endearing performance from its star, Melissa Benoist, the pilot, while displaying all the typical pilot-weaknesses — clunky exposition, telling where showing would suffice — also has the most important element for the start of something new: Potential.
But the name. We should talk about the name — not of the series, but of the character and, more vitally, the explanation provided for that name within the show. Audiences who stick will get over this, obviously. And there’s the whole fidelity-to-the-comic-book-universe thing to consider, and no one is saying you should mess with what’s canon, and so on and so forth. But the show’s internal defense of the name “Supergirl” does not make sense and invites more criticism than it effectively refutes.
To begin, some context: Kara (Benoist), like her cousin Clark/Superman, is living as an undercover Earthling. While her cousin has taken the “Clark Kent by day, Superman by night” approach, Kara doesn’t even moonlight as a defender of truth, justice, and the American way. She has kept her super-status totally to herself and works as a put-upon assistant, in the grand Devil Wears Prada tradition, to her media mogul boss, Cat (Calista Flockhart).
Kara is on an internet date gone viciously sour (the dude tells his waitress to leave her number on the check) when she sees that her adoptive sister, Alex, is on a plane that’s experiencing engine failure — cut to the plane: Flight attendants bracing for impact, emergency oxygen masks tumbling down, dun, dun dunnn — and, even though it upends a lifetime of normaling, Kara takes to the sky to bench press the 747 to a smooth, safe, water landing.
After a few important #branding moves of her own — a cape for aerodynamics, an “S” on the chest — and some more save-the-day exploits, Kara arrives at work to discover Cat has named this mysterious hero “Supergirl.”
Kara bursts into Cat’s office, outraged. “We can’t name her that!… I don’t want to minimize the importance of this. A female superhero. Shouldn’t she be called Superwoman?… If we call her ‘Supergirl,’ something less than what she is, doesn’t that make us guilty of being anti-feminist? Didn’t you say she’s a hero?”
First, Cat amends her subordinate’s views: “I’m the hero. I stuck a label on the side of this girl.” Which, okay, interesting angle to take there, that labeling another human without asking said human what they would like to be labeled is somehow heroic and/or empowering for anyone involved. That is a line that works if the audience is supposed to think, “Cat is kind of a self-aggrandizing jerk, of course she would say something that absurd and untrue.” But if we are not supposed to agree with Cat’s worldview, what do we do with what she says next? Which is:
And what do you think is so bad about ‘girl’? I’m a girl. And your boss. And powerful and rich and hot and smart. So if you perceive Supergirl as anything less than excellent, isn’t the problem you?
No! Nope. Not biting. Words strung together in a Shonda-Rhimes-y rhythm does not an actual, logical argument make.
During a conference call, one of Supergirl’s executive producers, Andrew Kreisberg, described the thinking being the scene: “We sort of wanted to have a conversation with our characters that we believed that the audience would be having, and that others might be having in terms of saying, ‘Well, she’s an adult woman — why isn’t it called Superwoman?’”
Cat can call herself a girl, I guess? If she wants to? But Cat is not a girl. She is a woman. She just… is. It’s not like one of those “oh, I can see both sides” situations, not a moment in the Britney-in-between, not a “how old is 15 really?” debate. Flockhart is 50 years old. There is no ambiguity here.
The problem with “Supergirl” as a name is not that it’s “anti-feminist.” The problem with “Supergirl” is that Kara — and, by extension, her hero-alter-ego — is an adult, which means she is not, in fact, a girl. She is a woman. Girl is an infantilizing word; Cat’s snappy attempt at declaring that she, a grown-up by all metrics by which a person could measure such a status, is a “girl,” is empirically ridiculous. Though we have known this character for all of 42 minutes, I expect that, were someone else — particularly someone in a professional setting — to refer to her as a “girl,” she would not take kindly to the term. Not to mention the fact that Kara’s cousin, the most obvious analogue here, isn’t called “Superboy.”
Given the amount of energy expended in the pilot to apologizing and/or justifying its hero’s moniker, maybe it would have been smarter to frame the How Supergirl Got her Name origin story as “Whoops, this is already trending on Twitter so we’re stuck with it,” instead of the setup the show opted for, which was, “If you think there’s something wrong with ‘girl,’ there’s something wrong with you.”
The show is so defensive about “girl” — not just the title but the broader idea of what girldom denotes in the world — that it overcompensates at every turn. When a man, watching Supergirl battle a male foe, says, “She’s not strong enough,” Alex responds with, “Why? Because she’s just a girl?” (Then, as Kara’s ass-kicking continues: “Exactly what we were counting on.”) If you are so inclined to roll your eyes at lines like that one, you will spent several minutes of the premiere staring at your ceiling.
But! But. This is still a debut that is charming, campy, and sweet, not to mention a welcome change of tone from most of the post-Dark Knight comic book flicks, which appear to be in some kind of arms race to see which can invoke the most 9/11 imagery while using the grayest, dingiest color palette.
The premiere landed CBS great ratings, too: 12.9 million viewers overall. (It should be noted that the episode had The Big Bang Theory as a lead-in, a boost it will lose next week.) Supergirl enjoyed the fourth-highest premiere ratings in adults 18–49, coming in only behind Fear the Walking Dead, Empire, and Better Call Saul.