Longtime Development Exec Praises Gough & Millar’s “Remarkable” Smallville Pitch

Deadline today ran a piece by longtime TV development executive Susanne Daniels who was at The WB network back in 2000 when Alfred Gough and Miles Millar pitched their “Young Clark Kent” series Smallville. We know how the story ends, but this piece by Daniels talked about how “remarkable” the original pitch had been.

“When Peter Roth was running Warner Bros, he called me to “preview” the Smallville pitch,” she recalled. “I remember telling him something along the churlish lines of ‘Superman didn’t feel exciting and fresh to me.’ Later that week, I bought the show halfway through Gough & Millar’s remarkable pitch.”

Of course, Smallville went on to go for ten seasons on The WB and successor network The CW, being one of the most successful series in the networks’ history. You can read the entire Deadline piece here.