Smallville, season 1

Clark Kent is a farm kid with secrets his parents help him keep: the strength, the speed, and the ship in the storm cellar that brought him down in the 1989 meteor shower. The shower itself is the season's engine - kryptonite-mutated townspeople, a freak of the week, each one a rehearsal for the question of what powers do to a person.

The pilot sets the two relationships that run the show. Lana Lang, the girl next door, wears a meteor-rock necklace that makes Clark physically sick - the show's neatest metaphor. And Lex Luthor, exiled to Smallville to run the fertiliser plant, hits Clark with a Porsche at sixty on a bridge and walks away alive, saved by something he cannot explain. The friendship that follows is genuine on both sides, and Lex's curiosity about the crash is genuine too - the tragedy installed in the premise.

Chloe Sullivan runs the school paper's Wall of Weird; Pete keeps the secrets he does not know he is keeping; Jonathan and Martha Kent do the show's quiet moral labour.

It ends with the town's rituals turning hostile - a scarecrow tradition, a tornado bearing down on Lana - and Clark outrunning the storm.