Naomi First Look Shows Off Out Of This World DC Character

The CW’s newest DC Comic series Naomi dropped a new trailer. In it, we get our best look at the world of the series. It’s a world where “superheroes aren’t real, right?”  But something comes to Naomi’s Pacific Northwest small-town world. Something powerful, fast, and big, and blue, which changes everything for the teenager.

Kaci Walfall (The Equalizer) plays Naomi McDuffie. Naomi is a cool, confident teenager who, unbeknownst to her, has a destiny to “journey to the heights of the multiverse” in search of the truth of who she really is. In the trailer, Naomi’s quiet little town is rocked by a superspeed battle, a blur in red and blue. (In the comics the battle was between Superman and the would-be world conqueror, Mongul). It seems that superheroes are real after all.

The series is just the latest in a line of comic book properties developed by the CW that connects the long history of the network. Telling the story of a young hero just beginning to discover themselves in small-town America has echoes of Smallville, which debuted on the CW predecessor the WB network in 2001. The WB and rival upstart network UPN combined in 2006 and became the CW.  Smallville continued its run on the new network. It ran for a total of 10 seasons, ending in 2011 with Clark Kent (Tom Welling) suiting up in the famed red and blue for the first time and becoming Superman.

This new series also has connections to the earliest days of the WB with Barry Watson (7th Heaven) and Mouzam Makkar (The Vampire Diaries) starring as Greg and Jennifer, Naomi’s adoptive parents. They appear at the end of the trailer. Naomi goes to tell them about what is going on with her, but might they already know?

Like Smallville, and other series that helped define the WB and the CW,  Naomi tells the story of young people, where their problems are overly dramatic and feel like the end of the world. But maybe in Naomi’s case they are.

“We’re telling these grounded high school stories in the midst of this epic cosmic struggle,” showrunner Jill Blankenship (Arrow) told EW. Blankenship executive produces the series with Ava DuVernay. She compares the story of Naomi to WB/UPN series Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Buffy was another series that focuses on a young person fighting the challenges of life in high school with the same energy of facing mortal peril from monsters and demons. “We’re balancing equally these two parts of Naomi’s life.”