If you turn on your TV or fire up one of your streaming accounts, chances are that you'll run into a superhero show. In the case of broadcast TV, one of the purveyors of super powered tales is Greg Berlanti, who produces over a dozen shows for the CW and other networks. Berlanti is best known for helping guide the "Arrowverse", the shared set of DC Comics television shows that started with Arrow and grew to encompass everything from Legends of Tomorrow to Superman & Lois. But he would first bring his trademark blend of soap drama and superhuman elements to the small screen with the short-lived ABC series No Ordinary Family.
Co-created by Berlanti and Jon Harmon Feldman, No Ordinary Family focuses on the lives of the Powell family: father Jim (Michael Chiklis), mother Stephanie (Julie Benz), son JJ (Jimmy Bennett), and daughter Daphne (Kay Panabaker). The Powells take a family trip to Brazil to try and reconnect – and nearly die in a plane crash. (Keep in mind, this was after Lost, so you could hardly blame ABC for trying to make lightning strike twice, and there have been far weirder origin stories for superheroes.)
After getting home, the family learns that they've gained superhuman abilities. Jim has immense strength and nigh-unbreakable skin; Stephanie can run at superhuman speeds; JJ possesses genius-level intellect; and Daphne can read minds. As the family starts to use their newfound powers, they also learn that the source of said powers is connected to Stephanie's work at the conglomerate Global Tech – and her boss Dayton King (Stephen Collins), who seeks to replicate what happened to the Powells.
From the jump, No Ordinary Family took a different approach from other superhero fare. While the Powells would encounter other superpowered beings, the major focus was on their lives and how they sought to balance everyday issues with their newfound abilities. The pilot episode contains a solid example: prior to their Brazil trip, Jim and Stephanie were struggling to connect. Her work had left her too busy to make time for the family, and he felt stuck in a rut with his job as a police sketch artist. After Jim and Stephanie learn about their powers, they start making an effort to reconnect by attending couples therapy while using coded language to discuss the superpowered events in their lives. (Sadly, this plot point was dropped early on in the series.)
The Powell children also had to deal with their abilities and how those abilities either hurt or helped their social standing. Daphne was fairly popular, but her telepathy started to drive wedges between her and her social circle; in the pilot, she learns that her boyfriend has been cheating on her with her best friend. She also wasn't above using her powers to try and get what she wanted, whether it was going to a party or trying to impress her crushes. This changed when she met Chris Minor (Luke Kleintank) while serving detention – the two formed a relationship that was fraught with peril, including Chris' father (Anthony Michael Hall) becoming far stronger than Jim after ingesting a mysterious serum from Global Tech, and Daphne attempting to use her growing powers to make Chris forget about her family's abilities but inadvertently erasing his memories of their entire time together.
JJ had his own problems. He was struggling in school before, and his abilities didn't manifest until the end of the pilot, leaving him to feel like he was the "freak" of the family. However, once he finally got his abilities he hid them from his family which led to a fraying of trust between him and Stephanie. It didn't help matters that Daphne would blackmail JJ in early episodes by getting him to use his hyper-intelligence for her own gain. JJ gets a spotlight of his own when he starts falling for his classmate Natalie (Katelyn Tarver) and helps solve her mother's murder. Complicating matters is the fact that his hormones interfere with his powers, essentially "short-circuiting" them -- which nearly gets him killed.
In addition to confiding in each other about their powers, the Powells also find solace in their friends. Jim tells his best friend George St. Cloud (Romany Malco) about his abilities and ropes George into helping him fight crime. The trouble is that George is a successful district attorney and Jim often runs into other officers at his precinct, leading to them narrowly escaping brushes with the law - a rarity in the superhero genre. Stephanie also confided in her lab assistant Katie (Autumn Reeser), who helped her study the phenomenon that gave the Powells their powers. Katie grew even further connected in the narrative when she started dating a man named Joshua (Josh Stewart); Joshua was a powered assassin who happened to be Dr. King's adoptive son, and was granted his powers via injections of a secret formula.
No Ordinary Family ends on the mother of all cliffhangers as Katie delivers her and Joshua's baby, George was placed on a plane with several convicts that ended up crashing in the same ocean that the Powells did, and the Powells were approached by the NSA to help them capture the now-superpowered criminals. Sadly, the show was canceled, but the setup for the second season shows that it would have continued to balance the family's everyday lives with the fantastic. And Berlanti would take these lessons to heart, as many of the DC superhero shows he produces also feature the heroes dealing with issues in their civilian lives as well as superpowered villains.
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