Superman & Lois premiered this week and, due to COVID-19 shutdowns, also gave the world a glimpse into the Vancouver Sun and Province newsroom for the first time. Sort of.
The latest CW superhero production began filming in and around Vancouver in 2020, and follows Clark Kent and Lois Lane as they move their family out of the city and back to Smallville where they hope to raise their teen boys.
Of course, the show would be incomplete if it didn’t at least briefly touch on Kent and Lane’s time spent at the Daily Planet, Metropolis’s most trusted source of daily news. The pair are pictured in a newsroom meet-cute early on in the premier, which aired this past Tuesday, and again as – spoiler alert! – Kent is fired from his job.
That newsroom though? It’s a real newsroom. Actually, it’s the Sun and Province newsroom.
In early October 2020, Vancouver Sun and Province staff were notified that the CW production had struck a deal to film in our east Vancouver office, which had been sitting empty since staff were sent home to work remotely in March 2020.
Staff were asked to come in at scheduled times to clear personal effects off their desks, to allow for production to set up. Filming then took place over a period of about two weeks in late October and early November.
Director Lee Toland Krieger, who directed the pilot episode of Superman & Lois, said the production team took their cue from Richard Donner’s Superman when setting up their own Daily Planet scenes.
“We wanted a Daily Planet that looked more like the Donner Daily Planet,” Krieger told Entertainment Weekly in a recent interview .
“That kind of All the President’s Men sort of giant suite with the fluorescent ceiling that goes on forever is almost impossible to find in Vancouver. We got as close as we could. We actually shot at the Vancouver Daily Sun newspaper, which had never had photography there because they’re a working newspaper.”
It’s true. The Vancouver Sun and Province have been at their current location at Broadway and Renfrew since 2017 and the newsroom is staffed seven days a week, with papers publishing daily.
“Just because of COVID, nobody was there and we got to shoot in there,” said Krieger.
While it was exciting to see our newsroom featured, a scene in which Kent is fired from his job hits just a little too close to home. Ouch. Everyone knows the journalism industry has battled cuts and layoffs for years and it’s no fun seeing it in a fictional work when you’ve lived the reality.
Following Kent’s firing, he and Lane hash out the ramifications of job loss while standing in the Daily Planet’s library which, yes, is also the Sun and Province’s library in real life.
That wall of papers? That’s where we archive recent print copies of the papers. Those rolling racks of folders labelled “library” in another scene? That’s where our librarian Carolyn Soltau painstakingly keeps old photos and clippings in order. That vending machine and coffee counter? Well, those are the work of production. (You think we’d keep coffee and food near our paper archives? Of course not.)
Another scene during which Superman chases the show’s baddie around the world in a high-speed air chase, has the duo flying past what’s meant to be construction taking place inside an office in Shanghai. In reality? That’s our lunch room!
Though it will still be some time before the world rights itself and our reporters head back to the office, it is nice to see our beloved newsroom getting its star turn.
You can watch the CW’s Superman & Lois on CTV every Tuesdays at 8 p.m. or scroll down to see them in action in our newsroom.