Recently, the Superman Homepage featured a live video interview with show producer Josephine Campbell, and we were able to call in to directly ask her a question, which was regarding why the decision was made to have Lois figure out the truth so early in the show's run. "There's sort of two decisions with that," Campbell responded. "And one is, it was actually a plot point that we had during our pitch. [Producers] Brendan Clougher and Jake Wyatt had come up with it, which is that this show is My Adventures with Superman, which is just as much Lois and Jimmy as it is Superman. So, for us, getting them together as a team and actually finally having them all on the same side, all in on the secret, was something that was important to us.
"It was something that is different than a lot of Superman media," she elaborated. "She never finds out until the very last episode, or Jimmy never finds out at all. So it's another way to say this is our different take on Superman. This is getting rid of some of these tropes. I think Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman has that scene with their time traveler who's, like, 'You have to be the dumbest woman in the world not to know this.' Our Lois is whip smart, so, for us, it also fed so well into the rom-com part of our show, which is secrets and lies are a thing that destroys relationships, or stops them before they even grow. So this is a huge one. Doesn't mean that there's not going to be more secrets or more lies — there's still going to be some secrets and lies going on, because they're in their 20s. But for us, it was different. It was showing how smart Lois was."
There was also the fact that it seemed like a strong way to expand on their relationship and for the series and the characters to grow beyond the bits audiences have seen before, while providing the opportunity to truly see them operating as a team.
"Now," Campbell enthuses, "they're in on helping Superman keep his secrets. And the other thing is that with these being shorter streaming seasons, it used to be you get 26 episodes at like 24 minutes in the '90s. Now, honestly, it's 21 minutes and 30 seconds and you never know if you're gonna get anymore. This is the approach I took to writing Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, which I was head writer of. And the approach I took as head writer of She-Ra: Princess of Power, which was, 'Maybe we'll get more seasons, maybe not. Let's do what feels right for this story.' And Jake and Brendan were wholeheartedly the ones who were, like, 'This makes sense to us. This makes sense for them. Let's go for it.'"
Ed Gross is the author of Voices from Krypton, the complete oral history of Superman, which covers the Man of Steel's 85-year history through the words of 250 people, with a foreword by Brandon Routh and an afterword by Mark Waid, which can be ordered HERE.