Um… SPOILERS!  Lots and Lots.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It’s the TV division of Warner Bros not having the legal rights to use Superman in a TV series due to their feature film franchise. But they did give us the second best thing.  We got us some Supergirl! And she comes in the form of actress Melissa Benoist (Glee, Homeland, Whiplash).

So the story goes like this… Kara Zor-El, cousin to Kal-El (Superman, Clark Kent) is sent to Earth by her parents, before Krypton explodes, to keep a watchful eye on baby Superman. But nothing ever goes as planned. Her ship gets hit by a shockwave when her planet goes Kaplooee and she suddenly gets sucked into the Phantom Zone (an area of space that acts as a prison for all of the galaxy’s bad guys). While inside, she remains in hyper-sleep and doesn’t age.

Years later, her ship somehow breaks free and continues its journey to Earth. Once she arrives, a now fully grown Superman locates her and hands her off to the Danvers family (former Superman Dean Cain and Supergirl Helen Slater). They raise her along with their real daughter Alex.

As Kara grows up she decides to hide her powers and just be a regular one of us (like that’s much fun). So she moves to National City and goes to work fetching coffee for Calista Flockhart’s super mogul Cat Grant. It seems like a pretty boring life for Kara until that one fateful day, while on a bad internet date (when are they ever good?), she discovers that the plane her sister is traveling on is in trouble and on its way down! And since Superman doesn’t have the legal right to be there, Kara takes to the air and rescues the plane (all on an impressive TV budget).

Having the need to tell someone of her heroic act, she reveals her secret identity to her male work friend (because it’s cool that everyone knows your secret identity on TV now-a-days – I’m talking to you “Flash” and “Arrow”). So this friend proceeds to make her a costume (I’ve yet to meet a guy who knows how to sew) and she flies off to do some super stuff. Well, that is, until some secret government task force (which her sister Alex is a part of) captures her with Kryptonite and orders her to stop with all this super non-sense.

The main secret government guy (David Harewood of Homeland) then informs her that when she came to Earth, she accidentally led all of the baddies from the Phantom Zone to our global paradise. And now they have to go through all kinds of trouble to recapture them. And as any Superman geek knows, this just happens to be more or less the exact same plotline for the entire sixth season of “Smallville.”

So yadda yadda – she defeats one of those bad guy aliens, plays nice with that secret government agency, and we the audience (not her) find out that her Kryptonian aunt is a very bad Army General (the female version of Zod) on her way to Earth to eliminate Kara and rule the world. Nothing says family like a megalomaniac militaristic aunt.

Oh, and I almost forgot –all of the Phantom Zone psychos want her dead because Kara’s real mother on Krypton was the judge that sentenced them all to that eternal prison. It’s good to be Kara!

So is any of this any good, you ask? Well, I enjoyed it. But it has problems. The pilot is WAY too rushed. I realize that they wanted to fit everything in so they could sell this thing, but without question this should have been a two hour episode. It would have played so much better if it was given more time to breathe. But instead, it feels like you’re watching an abbreviated version of the pilot. On the flip side, it’s not boring.

I thought that we were reminded one too many times that Kara is just a girl (watch Calista Flockhart’s ‘girl’ speech) and that girls might not be as strong as men. So it’s up to Kara to find her inner man (eh, strength) and step up to prove everyone wrong. Okay, I get what they were saying, but instead of just being subtle (and mature) about it, they hit you over the head with it and call you a dummy. Personally, I never would have touched upon it. The audience isn’t stupid. They don’t need to be lectured about gender equality. It’s the 21^st century after all. We dum-dums get it.

As for the performances, they were TV fine with a few exceptions. Calista Flockhart’s Cat Grant is a caricature. She’s not a real person or anything close to one. She would have been more at home on “Lois and Clark” in the 90’s. The character of Cat Grant can stay, but the way she’s written and portrayed needs to change. There’s a huge difference between writing a woman as being a strong, powerful, successful person and writing her as a bitch (excuse my French – whatever that means). And Flockhart’s Cat Grant is a bitch (French again). She is certainly not to be looked up to and definitely not to be emulated in any way.

I’m fine with the change to Jimmy (James) Olsen. Yeah, they clearly did a 180 to his character and he now looks like something out of Men’s Fitness, but change isn’t always necessarily bad. I guess they felt like they needed some strong male figures on the show. So they turned Jimmy Olsen from someone who needed to be saved into someone who looks like he could do the saving.

But now let’s just get down to the only character that matters on a show called “Supergirl.” And that would be — Melissa Benoist’s Kara Zor-El/Kara Danvers/Supergirl. Benoist does fine in the part, but there are some performance issues. Her ‘over the top’ cutesy attitude doesn’t really do the character of Kara any justice. Unlike Kal-El, her Kara Zor-El wasn’t raised her whole life on Earth. She lived a good amount of time on Krypton. And having been raised in an advanced civilization, realistically, she should be looking at humankind as a bit of a primitive society. So between her lineage and her advanced abilities, she should be brimming with confidence (or at least have a fair amount).  But instead, she is portrayed as someone who is in possession of a good dose of low self-esteem. Writing her personality with the excuse of ‘I’m just trying to fit in’ is just that — an excuse. 

It would have added a lot more dimensionality to her character if we could have seen this conflicting attitude of ‘the strong trying to act weak’ to fit in as opposed to the ‘weak trying to act strong.’ I think that Benoist does the best she can do with the material given to her, but in future episodes I certainly hope that she possesses the acting chops to step that material up a bit more.

And as for all the rest — the secret government agency is what you would expect from a show like this. Pretty light stuff. The bad guy in this episode is just ‘run of the mill.’ We do get a glimpse of Superman for a brief moment to just set things up, but only from obscured angles and CGI. Dean Cain and Helen Slater have almost nothing to do in the pilot, but I’m sure we’ll see much more of them throughout the series.

So what about all of the good stuff? Well, like I said earlier, even though the pilot is greatly rushed, it’s never boring. It moves quickly and gets to the point. Unlike “Smallville’s” ten year setup, this show gets going from episode 1, which means by episode 2 we’re up and running.

The effects looked great for a TV budget, though generally, pilots have more money to play around with. And this pilot had 14 million of those play dollars. Even though the following episodes are going to be made for a much smaller amount, I’m confident that the same guys who produce “The Flash” and “Arrow” will make them good great. After all, I’ve never seen a decline in episode quality since those two show’s pilots.

As for Melissa Benoist, even though her portrayal of Kara-Zor-El/Supergirl was a little iffy, I did still find her character cute and very likable. And I look forward in seeing what she does with the role.

And as for future storylines, let’s face it –they’ll never be hurting for material. They have years of comic lore to pull from.

So in wrapping up –although the pilot had some weak writing and played pretty much ‘by the numbers,’ I do keep in mind that this was indeed only the pilot. And pilots rarely knock it out of the ballpark from the get-go. Most TV shows need time to find their footing. And with the creative team behind this thing, I have faith we’ll see an increase in quality as the series progresses.

Bottom line: I had fun watching it and that’s all that ultimately counts. And I really do like that they’re keeping the tone of the show light in contrast to the recent “Superman” film franchise. I’ll definitely tune in and watch further episodes — when they premiere in about six months (this coming November).

If played right, I smell a hit for CBS.