Number of seasons: 10 Number of seasons it should have had: 5 Its rare for a series to devalue its own premise to quite the same extent that Smallville utterly exhausted its central idea. With its ending already confirmed and seemingly limitless time to kill before it reached that point, Smallville used its vast comic book heritage to fill ten seasons with cameos, in-jokes, and an awful lot of repetition before Clark Kent finally became the Man of Steel. The natural conclusion to the series actually arrived in 2006, when Jonathan Kent succumbed to a heart attack in the midseason finale of the fifth season. Smallville handled his death with a surprisingly amount of subtlety, but preserved Clarks immaturity by burying the emotional fallout under endless freak of the week plots in the second half of the season. The series was then forced to stall Clarks character development for years while the plot proceeded as if he had become Superman already, introducing the Justice League in season six and moving entirely to Metropolis shortly afterwards. A more streamlined version of Smallville would have ended at the fifth season finale, and in an ideal world, it would have inspired a live-action Superman show to succeed it. We can dream, right?
