No flights, no tights -- those are the rules on "Smallville." It's a wonder DC Comics didn't say, "No rights."

This is the perfectly modern story of Superboy, Kansas farm teen with budding superpowers and an achy angst.

He just wants to be normal.

"I'd give anything to be normal," Clark (Tom Welling) complains to his dad, Jonathan Kent (John Schneider, long past "Dukes of Hazzard").

We viewers know better. We know Clark Kent is destined to become a newspaper reporter, and hardly any of them are normal.

Clark's lament comes as he's having that all-important facts-of-life chat with his father.

It goes something like this: Son, you're an alien, and I ain't your dad.

He can't trust his mother, either. Martha Kent was played by one actress in the pilot but has suddenly morphed into Annette O'Toole.

If this were real life, Clark would probably reject his parents and start hanging out more with Smallville's youngest millionaire, the morally ambivalent Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum). Lex drives Porsches, lives in an outlandish mansion and wants to be buds with Clark.

Instead, he peers longingly through his telescope at the neighboring farm girl, Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk), who'd make Clark and most male viewers hope for a speed-up on his future X-ray vision powers.

Actually, the show is a little coy about Clark's powers. Apparently he's at a stage where he has super strength and super speed afoot, but flight hasn't yet crept into his consciousness.

He's just a regular kid from Krypton, whose Earth dad won't let him play varsity football.

"I could run at half-speed," he insists. "I won't hit anybody."

"Smallville" seems, most of the time, less like a Superman show than another WB attempt at "Roswell," which has moved to UPN.

As in "Roswell," there's plenty of hidden weirdness in town. And not just Superboy, either. The writers and producers also have an obsession with hanging teenage boys on crosses in farm fields, and make what you will of the blatant Matthew Shepard symbolism.

The pilot, at least, is a glossy production with a decent special-effects display in the first 10 minutes. That's when Smallville, Kan., "Creamed Corn Capital of the World," is pelted by meteors and the spaceship carrying the future Superman.

In perfect WB tradition, the show also features two stunningly attractive leads in Welling and Kreuk.

Welling, who had a recurring role in "Judging Amy" last season, is what every nicely sculptured male lead should be, with that irresistible substratum of youthful vulnerability.

Kreuk, new to American TV, is a sparklingly cute Canadian who closely resembles the teenage Valerie Bertinelli of "One Day at a Time."

Welling and Kreuk are almost too effectively cast. Their characters' attraction seems to be mutual, despite Lana's boyfriend. So it's a stretch to believe that these two lifelong neighbors are just getting to know each other in high school. But then, super suavity doesn't seem to be in this Superboy's superpower arsenal.

The real question is, why should "Smallville" work for the WB when "Roswell" didn't? The true-blue Superman saga is probably too played out to succeed on TV, but it hardly seems fun to watch an insecure high school kid suppressing his supernatural abilities.

Without more to recommend it than that, this show, like its conflicted hero, won't fly.