A super leap for WB’s timing

When the creators of “Smallville” heard that the WB Network was planning to move their series at the start of this season, they regarded the new time slot much like Superman would a barrel of kryptonite.

“Any time you move a show, it’s always dangerous,” writer-producer Al Gough said over lunch in Burbank recently. Gough and his longtime creative partner, Miles Millar, co-created the drama, a free-wheeling prequel to the Superman comic series that envisions Clark Kent as a small-town youth with a busy social life and some eye-popping abilities that couldn’t be addressed in your typical gifted-student program.

The producers already had had a bad experience with a schedule switch. Ratings for “Smallville” sank after a previous regime at the WB pushed the series from Tuesday to Wednesday, which a still-simmering Millar dismissed as “the dumbest move.”

Now WB executives wanted the series to open their lineup on Thursday, opposite CBS’ durable hit “Survivor” and two other youth-skewing series, ABC’s “Alias” and Fox’s hot soap “The O.C.” Even UPN was getting pre-season buzz for its new Chris Rock comedy, “Everybody Hates Chris.”

It looked like curtains for young Clark.

Instead, in a twist that has surprised the producers and challenged the conventional wisdom of the TV industry, “Smallville” has, in its fifth season, become a standout hit for the WB. The series is having its best season, up 28% compared with last year, with an average of 5.5 million total viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research.

It’s also given the WB what it never had before in its 11-year history: a solid presence on Thursdays, the most lucrative night of the week in terms of TV advertising revenue.

“It kind of bucked the odds,” Shari Anne Brill, an analyst at New York ad firm Carat USA, said of “Smallville.” “Usually in the fifth season, you’d start to see declines” in the ratings.

“It feels to me like arguably our best move of the year,” said David Janollari, president of WB entertainment, which otherwise has had a dismal TV season. Previously, the network “didn’t really have an identity on Thursday,” he added; last year, for instance, the network was running “Blue Collar TV” and “Drew Carey’s Green Screen Show.”

Despite all the talk of TiVo and other devices that allow viewers to bypass network lineups, scheduling can still be the Hollywood equivalent of no-limit poker. Millar is hardly the first producer to complain of “dumb” time-slot maneuvers; such battles make up a time-honored tug-of-war between series overseers and network “suits.”

This season, both Mark Burnett of “The Apprentice: Martha Stewart” and Dick Wolf of “Law & Order” have lamented the supposed effect of schedule shuffles on their shows. In recent weeks, industry attention was riveted to whether Fox would move its smash “American Idol” to Thursday nights. NBC executives waited until Fox announced “Idol” would stay on Tuesdays and Wednesdays before revealing their own midseason changes.

The Thursday move seems to have energized “Smallville.” This season’s debut found Clark transported to the “Fortress of Solitude,” an ice palace where he confronts his father, Jor-El, as a meteor shower threatens Earth. The episode required a number of costly special effects, as well as shooting Clark’s Tom Welling on an actual glacier.

“Every episode is like this big, great action movie,” Janollari said.

The schedule change came about during meetings last spring, when Janollari and his executives were puzzling over a chart for the fall lineup. “As I was staring at the schedule, I just, like, looked at the ‘Smallville’ card and ... picked it up and moved it to Thursday at 8, and I said, ‘What does everyone else think of this?,’ ” Janollari recalled. “The thinking was, ‘Well, let’s bring our loyal audience to Thursday nights.’ ”

Moving the show would rescue it from fierce competition on Wednesdays, where ABC’s smash hit “Lost” was attracting many sci-fi fans and UPN’s reality hit “America’s Next Top Model” was scoring with young women. “Those two shows cut so deeply into the ‘Smallville’ core audience that it was sort of held down for the last two years,” said Peter Roth, president of Warner Bros. Television, which produces the show.

Thursday had long been the domain of NBC, which had a string of top-rated comedies that night including “The Cosby Show” and “Friends.” But NBC’s streak ended with such flops as the “Friends” spinoff “Joey,” leaving room for other shows such as “The O.C.” to find an audience.

Still, the schedule transplant carried enormous risks: If “Smallville” faltered, Janollari might have been accused of killing a profitable asset for the network and Warner Bros., its main studio supplier. (The WB is jointly owned by Tribune Co., publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and Time Warner.)

As it has turned out, “Smallville” is giving WB executives a ray of hope in an otherwise brutal season. Despite heavy publicity and some favorable reviews, the new drama “Just Legal,” starring Don Johnson, tanked in the ratings and was quickly pulled; two other premieres, “Supernatural” and “Related,” have generated better numbers but failed to emerge as breakout hits. Overall, the WB has slipped 12% this season in its key adults ages 18-34 demographic, and lost ground to longtime rival UPN.

The results may call into question the network’s recent push to lure more 30-something viewers instead of the teenagers who turned out for past hits such as “Felicity” and “Dawson’s Creek.”

“They’re definitely in a transition mode right now,” Gough said of the network. The same could be said for Gough and Millar, who seem surprised and grateful that “Smallville” has done so well for so long but also are eager to move to their next challenge. The pair, who met in the mid-’90s at USC film school, seem unlikely partners. Maryland native Gough is the sort of amiable, rumpled guy at home in a baseball cap and sweatshirt; the British-born Millar is intense and more reserved, the one whose fingers are on the keyboard during their scriptwriting sessions. (In addition to “Smallville,” the duo worked on scripts for the features “Spider-Man 2” and “Herbie: Fully Loaded.”)

Neither was a comic-book fan before “Smallville.” After the series premiered in 2001, they attended their first Comic-Con, the massive comic-book trade show in San Diego. Gough was worried that they’d be viciously set upon by Superman purists, who might disapprove of such story touches as making young Clark friends with young Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum), Superman’s longtime nemesis.

Instead, fans swarmed the “Smallville” creators seeking autographs -- probably to “sell on EBay,” Gough said with a laugh.

Millar would prefer to focus on features. “We’ve been reluctant to do any more TV,” he said. “The failure rate is so high. You put all that work into it, and [the series] doesn’t work out.”

But “Smallville” isn’t letting its creators slip away from the medium that easily. In this season’s fourth episode, the writers introduced Arthur “A.C.” Curry, who saved Clark’s friend Lana Lang from drowning.

As comic fans know, Curry is actually the superhero Aquaman, who’ll be at the center of a still-untitled spinoff that Gough and Millar are writing, with an eye toward fall 2006. The writers already know their character will have a much more practical bent than the teenage Clark Kent.

“He’s got a very real-world agenda: the environment,” Gough said of Aquaman.