What drives me insane-- INSANE, I'm tellin' ya!!!-- is Noel Neill's invariable, repeated, insipid SHRUG every time something happens which even REMOTELY might lead her to suspect Clark is Superman. She also does it frequently when some thug does something suspicious, like "Git inna car, lady, we're here ta take yuz to Inspectah Hendason, dat crummy coppa. Ah'm de new police chauffeur intern." "Aren't you a little old to be an intern?" "Uh, yeah, see, I go tah night school." Shrug. And it's never VARIED-- like, say, an angry shrug, a dismissive shrug, an "I'm too busy for this nonsense" shrug, a "That guy isn't worth my time" shrug. It's a blithe, brainless "I don't know what's going on" shrug.

I think Phyllis Coates is the better actor. But much of this is directly the fault of the scripts. The second season was (presumably) begun with Coates in mind, and there are some nice opportunities for an actress to DO something instead of being a pretty prop to tie up then let loose. Once or twice-- and only once or twice-- Neill is allowed something other than superficial walk-though action and barely-functional dialogue, like The Wedding of Superman (though even there... eh...); moments in 5 Minutes to Doom in the early Dabbs Greer scenes, and certainly the bit with the Kryptonite in Defeat of Superman.

Coates plays it like she's doing Hildy in HIS GIRL FRIDAY, which is great. Paulette Goddard did the same on a Bob Hope radio broadcast in about 1949 (with Lugosi as the heavy and Sterling Holloway as his assistant!) I'm pretty sure the Lois change a the collaborative lobotomy on the character by both Mort Weisinger and Whit Ellsworth.

That said, Noel Neill is MY Lois Lane, just because the '51 episodes were already ancient history when I was a kid in the late 50s. I didn't see the "mean Lois" until the show returned in the mid-sixties.