‘Superman & Lois’ star and EPs say finale will ‘honor’ the end of the Arrowverse

Superman & Lois made it clear in the season 2 finale that it’s no longer set in the Arrowverse, but the showrunners and star say the series finale will still honor the CW’s shared universe of DC Comics dramas — in its own way.

The shortened final season kicks off Monday with a two-hour premiere, and after the next eight episodes air, the CW will no longer have any superhero shows on the air. It’s truly the end of an era that began 12 years ago when Arrow debuted on the network, leading to The Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, Black Lightning, and Batwoman, as well as the web series Vixen and Freedom Fighters: The Ray — not to mention the many big-budget multi-episode crossovers.

Superman & Lois began in the Arrowverse, since stars Tyler Hoechlin and Elizabeeth Tulloch first appeared as Superman and Lois Lane in those crossover episodes, but at the end of season 2, the series officially separated itself from the shared TV universe, so the Arrowverse officially concluded with The Flash last year.

“Inherently there’s so many pressures you feel with a TV show — just writing the script was pressure, and then producing it, and the second that the show began, it’s about Superman and Lois Lane, so there’s a responsibility that comes with that too,” showrunner Todd Helbing tells Entertainment Weekly. “With the Arrowverse, I’ve had 10 years of working in these shows and these worlds, and you want to do it justice, but you have to separate yourself from those feelings or you are not going to leave your house because it’ll be overwhelming.”

While Helbing and fellow showrunner Brent Fletcher still felt somewhat of a “responsibility” to the Arrowverse, they didn’t make it a priority while crafting the end of Superman & Lois.

“The best way that we could approach it was to just do the best version for our show,” Helbing explains. “[As for] Easter eggs, there’s the idealistic version — in a comic book you’d have all these characters at your disposal, so you can have whatever you want. But when you’re talking about schedules and money and budgets, it would be awesome to have [The Flash star] Grant [Gustin] in this, but it’s just not feasible. There are questions like that that come up, and then there’s the reality that hits you, and so ultimately, as we discussed in the room, we can just do what we can do, and I think the best way to honor what has been done for 10 years was to hopefully have the audience watch it and then feel satisfied.”

That’s also how Hoechlin approached his final performances as Superman and Clark Kent this season. “It’s been a crazy four years — I mean eight years of the character, but four years with this show in particular,” Hoechlin tells EW.

The man behind the Man of Steel adds that he was only thinking “a little bit” about his time in the Arrowverse while ending Superman & Lois. “But I wouldn’t necessarily say it felt like it was saying goodbye to all of that,” he muses. “In a weird way, when we started the show, it was very clear that it was going to be different than what we had been doing on the Arrowverse shows, so I was able to leave that behind from the beginning. When this was coming to an end, it was really just about this and its totality in the last four years just because it was such a separate thing in so many ways.”

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In the Superman & Lois season 2 finale, former Department of Defense head Sam Lane (Dylan Walsh) explained to his grandsons, Jordan (Alex Garfin) and Jonathan Kent (Jordan Elsass), that their father is Earth’s greatest hero. And as it turns out, he’s Earth’s only hero. “I’ve been working for the DOD for a long time,” he said in the episode. “I’ve seen things you would not believe — glimpses of other worlds and the leagues of superheroes they have on them. And even though we only have your father on this planet, thank God that we do, because he’s the finest of any Earth.”

Since the Arrowverse crossover Crisis on Infinite Earths got rid of the multiverse and merged all the show’s universes into one Earth (called Earth-Prime), the finale declaring that Superman & Lois‘ Superman is the only hero on this Earth means… well, just let Helbing explain. “I don’t know if I would specifically define it as not in the Arrowverse per se,” he previously told EW. “Maybe it’s not that binary. It’s more that the events in our show are not taking place on the same Earth as the current Arrowverse.”

Superman & Lois was originally intended to be part of the Arrowverse until “the pandemic hit,” Helbing added. “Things changed and we couldn’t do a crossover with Batwoman, and all of these references to Crisis through the pilot rewriting phase got stripped out just to make everything a little bit more clear for a broader audience. Then at some point in season 1 I had a conversation with DC, and we clearly wanted to put our own stamp on the show and our take on the Superman mythology. The original intent was to be part of the Arrowverse, but the further along we got and now, unfortunately, with the other shows being off the air, it just felt like the best decision was to have our Superman & Lois not be on the same Earth as the Arrowverse.”

The final season of Superman & Lois airs Mondays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on the CW.