Ah, the love triangle. A writer’s favorite device for shaking things up when a show gets stale. Some are successful, like Barney, Robin, and Ted from How I Met Your Mother, and some not so much, like Clark Kent, Lex Luthor, and Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk) in Smallville. It went so poorly in the show that Kreuk recently said she’s allergic to them.
Kreuk recently appeared on the Talk Ville Podcast, which features Clark and Lex themselves, Tom Welling, and Michael Rosenbaum. They were going over “Exodus,” the 23rd episode from the second season of the show.
“I loathe a love triangle,” she said. “I only like a love triangle when it’s done well. I think it sometimes is a cheat.” Back then, she said, it was thought that you couldn’t bring your characters together or the “show would die.” Because of that, showrunners “found all these ways” to extend the ‘will they, won’t they’ storylines.
“I have been so allergic to love triangles since Smallville that I have tried on every show I’ve worked on to [kill them]. I hate them so much.” Why? Because it “pit us all against each other. Every woman on this show in the fan community was hated depending on which girl they liked.”
A fan of Chloe? They hate Lana. A Lana fan? Automatic Chloe hater. That, she said, was hard because “they all hated us” and that their worth as characters was only determined by who Clark liked at that moment in the show. What that did was “reduce” the women into these really simple terms which didn’t serve them as characters, and made them seem almost like afterthoughts.
Welling and Rosenbaum both agreed with her sentiments. “That’s what I didn’t like,” Rosenbaum said. “It was like all the female characters, it made them weaker and I’m like ‘stop, that’s bullsh**.’ He doesn’t think it was the writers’ intention to make the women characters read that way, but when you keep doing the same ‘jealous girl, jealous girl, crying girl, crying girl,’ it just becomes ineffective,” Rosenbaum said.
Kreuk thinks that’s just the product of the time the show was made in. “That would not happen today,” she said. “They would not be written today.” Rosenbaum pointed out that every show at the time on the CW network had love triangles, whether it was Vampire Diaries or One Tree Hill.
If you are or ever were a Smallville fan, it’s a pretty good chat. Check out the full video. It’s fun re-living the series and getting all the behind-the-scenes tea.