BREAKING NEWS: "Smallville" picks up season 10!

What invariably happens with any superhero show is that they initially try to be as faithful as possible to the source material, but put thier own spin on it. As things progress, however, they find that things like "The incident that happened between page 5, pannel 6, where Thor excused himself to go to the bathroom, and panel 7 when he came back is vitally important to the character's development and my own OCD!" become needlessly hampering to the writer's ability to tell stories, and so they diverge from the accepted way things go, subtly at first, but more obviously as they go along.

The perfect example is the DCAU, which picked up more-or-less exactly where Burton's Batman left off, then decided to bring back the Joker, then introduced its own characters, then did crossovers with more heroes, then basically said 'screw it' and went its own way entirely, since the Batman movies had pretty much tanked by that, and who wants to spend five years being beholden to one lousy movie? Then they got bored, and did a Superman show, which fit in with the cartoon batman, but NOT the standard DC continuity. Then they did another Batman show, which tied in with both the previous ones, but was increasingly unrelated to the standard DC timeline. Then they introduced Static Shock and that goofy robot thing, which weren't even *IN* the DC universe at the time, and then Justice League, which deliberately went its own way, and Teen Titans, which can be argued to have no relationship to its namesake at all. (Though obviously it does).

Same thing here: This iteration of Superman has developed its own continuity which diverges from the standard one. There's no Batman, Ollie is effectively the Green Knight or Dark Green Knight, or whatever. The Justice League hasn't even really been formed yet.

I don't see this as a bad thing, really. It frees up the kinds of stories they can tell, and honestly what's the point of telling stories about a stock character if you don't push him in different directions? I mean, how many "King Arthur" stories have there been, and how boring are the ones that remain too true to La Morte d'Arthur?

I know they said at the start of the show, "No flights or tights" but a] I can't imagine they thought they would go 10 years and 2] it seems like at some point you have to let him fly or it's not Superman.  They talk about having to be true to the canon and I'm pretty sure that--somewhere in at least one of the comic books--Superman flies.