When I'm working, I either listen to music or put low-impact stuff on the TV - movies and TV shows I've seen before or that otherwise don't require active attention, so it's more of a background. Lately it's been Smallville, as I've always been a big fan of the Superman mythos.

Smallville, KS, is the town where Clark Kent grew up with his adoptive parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent. Superman's adult hometown of "Metropolis" is never placed in a specific state in the comics and movies, though in the previous Lois & Clark TV series, it was pretty clearly on the northeast coast of the United States, like New York. Smallville, however, has always been identified as being in Kansas. (In the current series, Smallville is described as a "three-hour drive" from Metropolis. In Lois & Clark, Clark's parents had to buy airplane tickets to get to Metropolis from Smallville.)

Smallville is obviously a small town. It's surrounded by farms, apparently only has one coffee shop (the Talon), and has little of what a "city" is supposed to offer. There's never been a mention of a Smallville Mall, for example, and there is apparently only one high school in the town, Smallville High. Having grown up in a small town about 30 minutes from a big city (and about four hours from Dallas, a really big city), it felt about right.

Then, in one of the third-season episodes, Clark was trying in vain to describe a bad guy to the sheriff, but he didn't have enough details to make it work, so the sheriff said, "In a town of 45,000 people, Mr. Kent, that's not much to go on."

45,000 people?? The linked review for season 1 gives the same figure:

Even in strong "freak of the week" episodes, however, there remains one major flaw in the show's logic. Smallville has a relatively small population of 45,001, but no one in town seems to find it suspicious that two or three teens and other townspeople die each week under strange circumstances. Sure, Chloe keeps track of things on her "Wall of Weird," but even she doesn't seem to acknowledge the extent of Smallville's decreasing population.

That's not the biggest problem. If Smallville had 45,000 people in it, it would be the eighth-largest city in the state of Kansas, barely behind Salina and its estimated 2003 population of 45,833. It would have more people than Manhattan, home to Kansas State University, a Big XII school. It would be at least Mediumville.

Any town with more than about 40,000 people needs more than one high school, and certainly wouldn't be based around a single main street like Smallville is on TV. Such a large population would explain why kids keep arriving and vanishing without too many people noticing, even though at other times, everyone seems to know everyone else. Still, when the producers came up with that figure as a "reasonable size" for a small town that would support their story lines, did any of them bother to look at census data and figure out that it would be close to the seventh-largest city in the state?

I know that in dealing with a teenager from another planet with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal teens, the producers already have enough suspension of disbelief going, but we buy the Superman story. Smallville was supposed to be about life in a small town, and they try to make it look that way - until it's too much of a constraint, when they tripled the size of the town while keeping everything else sized for 15,000 people.

(Ironically, Smallville would also be the eighth-largest city in Oklahoma, falling between Enid and Moore on the list. So it's not just that Kansas is full of people - it's that "Smallville," in the eyes of producers who live in large cities, isn't really that small at all.)