Smallville, Season 1 (2001)

A meteor storm bombards the Kansas town of Smallville and its surrounding farms, claiming several lives and sowing the entire region with glowing green rocks.  Unknown to most, right amidst the meteors is a tiny spacecraft, containing a single alien child.  Johnathon and Martha Kent adopt the child, concealing his origins from everyone but the youngster himself, and raise him as their own.

Twelve years later, Clark Kent is a mostly regular teenage boy in most ways.  He's mooning over an unattainable girl, hanging out with his friends, and thinking about trying out for the football team.  But unless you've lived under a media blackout for your whole life, you probably already know that Clark's very much not ordinary.  The teenager who will become Superman is gifted with superhuman strength, speed and resilience, and he seems to be developing x-ray vision.  Which of course, he sometimes uses in ways that are a tad creepy, but which mostly align to "stopping whatever bad guy has turned up this week as the result of those glowing green rocks".

Smallville feels a bit like someone mashed together superheroes and one of those high school drama TV shows like Beverly Hills 90210 or Degrassi High.  It spends as much time - if not more - on Clark's everyday life as it does on him tangling with villains.

Said villains, as noted above, almost always have something to do with the glowing green meteor rocks (which also make Clark sick, since of course they're made of kryptonite).  On the one hand, linking superpowers to kryptonite is a neat way to explain why all these people with weird powers keep popping up in a small Kansas town; on the other hand, it rather stretches credulity that the only people who seem to make this connection are a bunch of kids from the high school paper.

(On the other other hand, I like that said kids pretty rapidly adapt to the reality that their town is full of weirdness.  By halfway through the season, they're no longer spouting inanities like "But people can't just (do thing X)!", they're actively coming up with theories based on "what if someone could do thing X?".  It's nice to see protagonists who actually react to the reality they are in.)

So should you watch Smallville?  Well, if you like superheroes and you aren't put off by the high school setting, with all the high school angst that implies, then yeah, you probably should.  It's not especially ambitious, but there'll always be a place for undemanding "comfort food" entertainment.