“Krypton” had one job: make Superman’s grandfather matter. Syfy’s series, developed by David S. Goyer, ran two seasons and 20 episodes, premiering March 21, 2018, and ending August 14, 2019. It sets its story roughly 200 years before Kal-El’s birth, on the planet itself, and asks us to care about a family name before the most famous member of that family exists. That is a hard sell, and “Krypton” never quite closes it.
The show follows Seg-El, played by Cameron Cuffe, whose House of El has been ostracized and shamed. He fights to redeem his family’s honor and save his world from chaos. The premise is clean. The execution is not.
Trailer, via SYFY.
Seg-El and the House of El
Seg-El is the engine, and Cuffe plays him with a straight-backed seriousness that the material only sometimes earns. The problem is structural. We know how this ends. Krypton blows up. The House of El produces Superman. Any tension the show builds around whether Seg can save his world runs into a fact the audience brought in with them.
“Krypton” knows this, and to its credit it does not pretend otherwise. It stacks the deck with time travel and off-world visitors, most notably Shaun Sipos as Adam Strange. Strange arrives as a link to a larger DC continuity, and Sipos gives him a looseness the rest of the cast rarely gets to share. He is the one character allowed to seem like he is having a bad day rather than carrying a dynasty.
Around Seg, the show builds a household of grudges. Ian McElhinney plays Val-El. Ann Ogbomo plays Jayna-Zod. Georgina Campbell plays Lyta-Zod, the first role cast, and the one the series leans on hardest for its emotional stakes. Wallis Day plays Nyssa-Vex. Aaron Pierre plays Dev-Em. Rasmus Hardiker plays Kem. Each name carries a piece of the planet’s politics, and the show wants us to track all of it.
A Planet Already Falling
The setting is the show’s best asset and its biggest trap. Krypton here is not a doomed rock waiting for a red sun to fail. It is a stratified society with a military caste, a religious caste, and a ruling class that has decided the House of El is a problem to be managed. That is a real idea. It gives the show somewhere to go that does not depend on Superman showing up.
But “Krypton” spends much of its first season on the mechanics of that politics rather than the people inside it. Ten episodes is a short runway, and the series uses a good chunk of it on councils, bloodlines and betrayals that blur together. The second season, which premiered June 12, 2019, pushes harder into spectacle. It brings in Emmett J. Scanlan as Lobo, a character built for noise, and Colin Salmon as General Zod, a name that does more work than any single scene.
Zod is the show’s sharpest idea. He is family, or close enough to it, and he is also the future’s problem. Salmon plays him with a calm that reads as threat, and the second season gets real mileage from putting him across from Seg. When “Krypton” works, it works because two people who share a bloodline want different things from it.
Brainiac, Jax-Ur and the Villain Problem
Blake Ritson plays Brainiac, and Hannah Waddingham plays Jax-Ur. Both are good gets. Brainiac is the show’s attempt at a cosmic-scale threat, and Ritson gives him a still, precise menace that suits the character. Jax-Ur gives Waddingham a chance to play someone who has already lost and has decided what she is willing to do about it.
The villains are not the issue. The issue is that “Krypton” keeps reaching for scale it cannot afford. A broadcast cable genre show in 2018 had a ceiling, and “Krypton” hits it often. The planet looks like a set. The action looks like a schedule. When the show tries to sell the end of a world, the budget says otherwise, and no amount of committed performance covers that gap.
The show also carries real behind-the-scenes weight. The series’ creators intended Shaun Sipos’s Adam Strange to be an LGBTQ+ character, but the show only implied it, following alleged interference from former DC executive Geoff Johns. That outcome is what viewers got: an implication, never a confirmed story. Regé-Jean Page auditioned for Seg-El and was not cast. Johns reportedly believed the character had to resemble Superman actor Henry Cavill, because early fans thought the show might work as a prequel to the 2013 film “Man of Steel.”
That is a casting decision made to protect a franchise’s look rather than to serve a story. It is also, in hindsight, the kind of call that ages badly.
What Two Seasons Bought
Syfy canceled “Krypton” in August 2019, after two seasons. Twenty episodes is a complete thought, barely. The show ends without the ending it was building toward, which is its own kind of verdict.
Here is what the series got right, in this paper’s view:
- Colin Salmon as General Zod. The strongest piece of casting on the show, and the one thread that makes the second season worth finishing.
- The decision to make Krypton a society rather than a countdown. It gave the show a subject beyond Superman’s origin.
- Shaun Sipos as Adam Strange. A necessary release valve, and the closest thing “Krypton” had to a character who could change the room.
- Blake Ritson as Brainiac. A clean, controlled threat that the show never fully used.
- The House of El premise itself. Strong on paper, underfed on screen.
Everything below that line — the council intrigue, the prophecy mechanics, the endless talk of honor — is noise.
The Verdict on Krypton
“Krypton” is a show that understood its premise better than it could execute it. The idea of following Seg-El through a shamed House of El, two generations before the planet dies, is genuinely good. It gives a familiar mythology a new angle and a new clock. But the series spends too much of its short life on politics it cannot make vivid and spectacle it cannot afford, and it never finds a reason for Seg to be more interesting than the family he is trying to save.
The published critical score sits at 5.3/10, with a Metacritic score of 53/100. That feels right. “Krypton” is not a disaster. It is a competent, occasionally sharp genre show that never becomes the thing it is reaching for. The Zod material is the part worth remembering. The rest is a planet that never quite came alive before it was taken off the air.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.