Wow, you must've watched a different version of the Supergirl finale episodes than I did. The two episodes I watched in November were nigh-incomprehensible, to the point of not even doing basic things like calling characters by name. As you said, the writing on that show never matched Melissa Benoist's considerable acting chops.
Nah, I imagine we watched the same versions, but just had different takeaways. The CW stopped doing personalized programming for me some time ago, hang it. (I would have greenlighted
Green Arrow and the Canaries without a second thought, to take just one example.)
Yeah, for the reasons I mentioned the whole show was ultimately an exercise in enduring frustration and I'm afraid that's how it may be remembered. Melissa was terrific, and going a step further, pound-for-pound I would say that
Supergirl had the best regular cast of any of the Arrowverse shows, with no real weak link. I thought David and Chyler were superb, I loved Jeremy, it was nice to see Calista Flockhart providing so many laughs in the first season, and I thought Mehcad was a strong actor (given little or nothing to do). Of the later additions, I enjoyed Nicole and Jesse tremendously and came around on Azie Tesfai after not really understanding her character's role for a while. She's a good actor. Then you have Katie McGrath, who was outstanding for the whole run. I was also a Chris Wood fan - more comic relief and a very likeable guy. Andrea Brooks? Great. So were Julie Gonzalo and Sam Witwer. On top of that, add in the peripheral players (like Dean Cain, Helen Slater and Brenda Strong) and the guest stars, most of whom were top-notch. (I always wanted Peter Facinelli to come back as Maxwell Lord.) A little bit of Jon Cryer's Lex went a long way for me, but that was okay. He worked well with the material they gave him, certainly.
That's . . . a veritable metric ton of acting talent. And yet the show never capitalized and ended too early (after what I thought was a pretty strong S6). I know the official reason is that Melissa wanted to be with her baby, and who can blame her, but honestly I bet she was also equally tired of the same old pitfalls that the writers kept falling into. The writing almost never failed to fail in misusing many of the cast members entirely (Jimmy, e.g., but also Mon-El and Winn), underdeveloping ideas, offering up subpar dialogue and revisiting cliched situations. Plus, they never quite figured out how to write credible threats for a Kryptonian, so after S1 most villains were either Kryptonian equivalents like Reign or the Daxamites, or people using Kryptonian substances or technology or clones like Lex. They also toyed with the alternative, which was Supergirl facing situations that she should have been able to handle in two shakes, so they depowered her in dumb ways. (
The Flash has had the same problem throughout its run, but I think that group of writers has mostly handled it far better.) Finally, the
Supergirl creative team even managed to ruin the wonderful Kara/Alex dynamic for far too long.
Given the
Supergirl cast's overall excellence, I really hope to see a lot of them in future DC shows. I know they already had Alex on
The Flash I believe (I have not yet seen the beginning of this
Flash season so no huge spoilers for that, please!). Honestly, the cast members are all so young that I could see them doing a
Supergirl limited series or something in the future. With, let's hope, better writing.
