‘My Adventures With Superman’ Preview: “Season 2 Was a Little Wild West”

This Saturday night – Midnight, to be precise – the best superhero show on TV returns. My Adventures With Superman, an anime-infused take on DC’s Man of Steel, first premiered last year, and enchanted fans with its thrilling reinvention of the main characters and mythology, adorable romance between Superman (Jack Quaid) and Lois Lane (Alice Lee), and big action sequences.

And while Season 1 of the series had a propulsive thrust to the plot thanks to Superman tackling his mysterious Kryptonian origins while battling the equally mysterious Task Force X, when it comes to Season 2, the producers were in uncharted territory.

“Season two was a little wild west because we had season one pretty figured out and flush out for our pitch to get our show greenlit,” Co-Producer Josie Campbell told The Parent Watch. “Season two was like… Krypton, Supergirl, space? It was really fun because we just all got to go hog wild. The writers were just pitching, basically, it was like, ‘What do you want to see? It's in, let's do It.’ The designers were going HAM. Even the music is so much more intense this season than it was in season one. Everybody's built on what we had for season one and it's really, really big and impressive.”

In the first season, we met a young Clark Kent as he joined Lois and Jimmy Olsen (Ishmel Sahid) in an internship at the Daily Planet. After getting promoted in the season finale – and Jimmy getting rich thanks to Flamebird, his viral gossip app – things are very different going into season two. Entering the mix are a new version of a classic villain – Lex Luthor – and down the road, Superman’s cousin, Supergirl. 

“The show is always written from a place of character, the characters of Clark, Lois, and Jimmy drive season one, they drive the action and who they were was the first thing we figured out,” said Co-Executive Producer Jake Wyatt. “In the pitch, it was the core of the show, it's the core of every episode. We came up with new characters in season two that needed to be as rich and as clear and as motivated as the characters that we introduced in season one.”

One of those characters? Brainiac, the classic Superman villain who gets a terrifying reinvention, and a tease in the early episodes provided for critics. “It was so fun to reimagine Brainiac and Supergirl,” Wyatt continued, “and really get into it and figure that out with our writers room… On the other side with our designers and they'd come in and be like, ‘That is the strangest Brainiac I've ever seen. Let's go with that. That's awesome.’ He's a weird combination of polygons. Let's do this.”

While the writers were in the Wild West, the actors were in a different situation as they recorded seasons one and two at the same time.

“It's still weird for me to say I'm Superman out loud,” Quaid noted. “It always feels like a weird flex… It really hit me when I saw the show for the first time, because… we recorded seasons one and two, more or less in a vacuum. We didn't even really meet. I met Alice as we were both kind of passing by each other on our way into a record, an hour of record. And I didn't meet Ishmael until we were done recording entirely. But then when I watched the show for the first time, I was just blown away because you do it in a vacuum. And then you see what the animators did and the music, and it's also surreal. And it became more real to me in that moment. But yeah, it's still blowing my mind that we get to play around in this universe.”

All three actors lauded the production team for making them feel comfortable, and giving them the groundwork they needed to capture the characters – particularly as they were working in the “vacuum” Quaid mentioned. And Lee specifically called out that Season 2 is where she got to truly understand the intrepid reporter.

“Definitely by the time it was season two, I felt way more comfortable with Lois,” Lee said. “I got to know her a lot better, and I think I found a pocket.”

And now that they do feel that comfort level, will the show continue?

“I hope we get a season three,” Quaid added. “So that now we've seen it, we know how the characters look when they're talking and their general vibe, and we are really way more familiar with each other's performances. So we'll be able to come into the booth a lot more informed if we continue, which would be great.”

My Adventures With Superman Season 2 premieres Saturday, May 25, at midnight ET/PT on Adult Swim, and streams the next day on Max.