The CW Cancelled ‘Supergirl’ the Second They Got a ‘Superman’ Show

There are four comic book characters who tower above the rest in terms of popularity and presence in the cultural zeitgeist: Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and Wolverine. If you have one of those characters in your project, you’re pretty much golden. If you don’t, you’ll probably spend a good deal of time trying to turn another character into one of them.

For example, The CW has had serious limits on the DC characters they’ve had access to for television, and so without Batman they made Arrow, a show ostensibly about Green Arrow but that felt much more like a Batman show than it did a Green Arrow show, even compared to the darker, 1980s Mike Grell Green Arrow run. Without Superman, they expanded the world first with Flash, a more optimistic hero, and later with Supergirl, a show that may as well have just been called Not Superman, Wink Wink.

Never having much of her own supporting cast or gallery of villains, most of the characters on Supergirl were borrowed from Superman, like Jimmy Olsen and Cat Grant, and villains like Metallo, Manchester Black, and even Lex Luthor. Most of the story elements not borrowed from Superman came from The Legion of Super-Heroes, originally supporting cast members from Superboy comics.

Things have changed at the CW, and Warner is less opposed to having different versions of the characters appear on TV and in movies; the multiverse is becoming an increasingly large part of the brand’s identity, and that lead to The CW getting the okay for a Superman and Lois show spun off from Supergirl.

Everyone knew that this made Supergirl redundant and The CW confirmed it on Tuesday, announcing that the forthcoming sixth season of Supergirl would be the last. It’s also basically the second time Supergirl was cancelled, as it was originally on CBS and didn’t move to The CW because its ratings were so great.

Still, if you can look past the incredibly toxic and annoying ‘Supercorp’ shippers who want Supergirl and Lex Luthor’s sister Lena to be in a relationship because they can’t imagine a platonic female friendship existing, Supergirl had its good moments. Most of them revolved around Legion of Super-Heroes characters Mon-El and Brainiac 5, but they were still pretty good.

In fact, if you want my advice, CW execs, and why wouldn’t you, you’re owned by the same people who made S**t My Dad Says a TV show so you’re obviously not above taking ideas from bloggers, you send Supergirl into the future with the Legion in the last episode. Then you get Melissa Benoist and her husband and Jesse Rath and you do Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes as a limited series on HBO Max. Give it a big budget, lots of special effects… there’s no way it’s worse than Titans.