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Donald Trump told Republicans to vote as if he were on the November ballot. But Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, doesn’t want the whiff of that directive lingering as the party heads towards a likely brutal November upset.

“If the Republicans lose the midterms it’ll be because [Senate Majority Leader] John Thune didn’t get the SAVE America Act passed,” Miller wrote on X Tuesday, adding that the predicted loss coming for the conservative caucus “rests solely on John Thune’s shoulders.”

It’s easy to see why Trump’s deportation chief would uplift the SAVE America Act as an election cycle hail Mary.

The original iteration of the SAVE America Act proposed numerous amendments to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, chief among them a requirement that voters bring either a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. Critics argued that the mandate would have unduly restricted millions of Americans from voting, pointing out that half of the country’s population lacks a passport, and furthermore that the legislation would have made it difficult for anyone who changed their name—including married women—to register at all.

Nonetheless, the White House heralded the voter restriction bill as a critical component to ensuring America’s election integrity and voter security. Trump went so far as to predicate his support for any other legislative efforts on the SAVE Act’s passage, repeatedly insisting that it should be Congress’s top priority for the year.

But the whole initiative came to a standstill over the summer when, after many failed efforts to pass the bill on its own, House Republicans tied it to the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act. That, in turn, has stalled the typically uncontroversial defense bill in the upper chamber.

Now the SAVE America Act is just one of 650 bills awaiting Senate action.

Meanwhile, Republicans are expecting some sorry losses during the midterms. Attention has recently shifted toward Alaska and Ohio—states that have historically been reliably red—and away from purple regions such as North Carolina, which Politico reported Tuesday has been perceived as a “money sink for Dems.”

President Donald Trump is personally making tens of millions off of the AI industry. 

In financial disclosures filed Tuesday, Trump revealed that he’d made a total of 1,156 securities transactions in the month of July, CNBC reported. The president purchased at least $43.6 million worth of shares and sold at least $35.6 million.  

The largest transactions were sales of Microsoft and Amazon shares on July 20, which totaled between $5 million and $25 million each. A few days later, Trump reported buying between $100,001 and $250,000 of Microsoft and between $1,001 and $15,000 of Amazon. 

It’s particularly disturbing considering that the president has emerged as a champion for artificial intelligence and data centers—an industry that Microsoft and Amazon have invested billions of dollars in. At the same time, these companies are paying straight into the president’s pockets for his various vanity projects. 

Also concerning: The filing revealed that the president sold between $250,001 and $500,000 of Northrop Grumman, an aerospace and defense company, on the same day he signed an executive order that would tighten supply chain requirements for defense contractors. 

The president’s trades totaled between $79 million and $270 million—down just slightly from June, when he traded shares worth between $78.1 million and $263.1 million. Trump has long maintained that trading is done by independent advisers on his behalf and that his portfolio is managed without his input. 

I guess we’ll just have to take his word for it, as Trump continues to get richer and richer. The president’s 2025 financial disclosure showed that he made more than $2 billion during his first year back in the White House, thanks to cryptocurrency, foreign real estate, stock trading, and more. In 2025, the president bought or sold stocks 21,000 times with companies he talks about publicly, but his initial self-reporting of his trading last year showed only 800 transactions—way less than what he actually did.

Backslash Security, a four-year-old Tel Aviv-based AI security biz, recently gave out its first Agent of the Month award to an AI agent called Newman, named after a character from the 1990s TV show Seinfeld. Newman received the award after being nominated by Jerry, another Seinfeld-inspired AI agent. Jerry's nomination message said, "Newman shipped 146 research findings in 60 days, but volume isn't why he wins. Every other agent depends on him. Kramer's best posts started as Newman findings. Elaine's PRDs [product requirements documents] reference his landscape scans. Strip any other agent and the team degrades. Strip Newman and the team goes blind. He's not just the most productive agent, he's the raw material the entire pipeline runs on," according to Backslash Security co-founder and CEO Shahar Man. And when Newman's acceptance message was read aloud at an all-hands meeting, "The whole room lost it," Man explained in a social media post. "We treat our agents as team members," Man wrote. "They have names, roles, a reporting structure, and now apparently, career ambitions. When your AI agents start nominating each other for awards and writing in-character acceptance speeches ... something has genuinely shifted." What has shifted at Backslash is both the technology of work and the relationship people have to that technology. Naming agents and giving them backgrounds based on TV characters doesn't mean much functionally. But it signals organizational focus and encourages a collaborative rather than antagonistic relationship between staff and AI models. Harvard Business School researchers recently noted that at least 30 percent of generative AI projects are forecast to be abandoned, often, they argue, not because the tools fall short but because employees quietly reject technology they see as a threat to their professional roles. So to the extent that naming agents makes staff more comfortable with the technology, there may be an organizational benefit to anthropomorphizing task-based inference workloads. Backslash CTO Yossi Pik named his entire agent team after Seinfeld characters. Beyond Newman (research) and Jerry (orchestration), there's Elaine (security research), Kramer (blogging and social media), George (marketing), and the Soup Nazi (quality control), among others. Rani Osnat, a seed investor and VP of marketing for Backslash, told The Register that these are Claude agents in a Cowork environment. "We wanted to create an environment that is like a virtual team," said Osnat. "So each agent actually has a domain of responsibilities and they work together as a team." The agents relate to one another in specific roles. Osnat said Jerry orchestrates and coordinates, and the Soup Nazi does reviews and critiques other agents' work, and so on. The agents, he said, were given a character background from Seinfeld and exhibit that history more in diction than in behavior. Their names are not purely labels in an AGENTS.md file that contains text directives telling an agent how to operate. But their imposed identities don't have all that much influence on task execution beyond shaping their style of text output. The George agent, for example, isn't instructed to lie like the agent's TV namesake. The Kramer agent isn't told to just stop work on a whim as the TV Kramer would do. "One of the agents is J. Peterman, Elaine's employer from the J. Peterman catalog, and he has a certain way of talking," Osnat said. "So he gave one of our real team members feedback and then said something about locking something and then he just went off on a tangent saying, 'I once spent a month in Kenya negotiating a key to a door that turned out to be a curtain.'" Osnat said on one level this is just for fun but also it's because you expect them to behave in certain ways in certain roles. It may also have an acclimating effect. Backslash has wired up an agent to handle onboarding for new employees, so it's important for new hires to engage with AI agents without fear or anger. "We didn't outsource the people management," said Osnat. "The agents are not evaluating. They're not telling people they're fired or anything like that or promoting them. But we do have them assign work based on availability, based on capabilities they know. A lot of our onboarding for new employees is now managed by an agent, just to tell the person, 'Oh okay, you've done that, now we'll go do this,' as part of your onboarding experience." Osnat noted that the company's engineering team has its own set of agents named after characters from Breaking Bad. And he's working on a set of agents inspired by The Sopranos. ®

Quick Take

• Halo Studios, formerly 343 Industries, is no longer at the helm of Halo. The game series has been moved under Call of Duty publisher Activision’s umbrella. Halo Studios will now only handle upkeep on the current Halo titles on the market moving forward.
• This comes on the heels of Microsoft’s most significant restructuring in their history. Studios are changing hands, being downsized, and in some cases being dissolved entirely.
• Nerdist‘s Take: If you’d told me this ten years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. I better get a Soap MacTavish skin in Halo out of the deal.

Microsoft just handed one of its most notable legacy franchises to the guys behind Call of Duty, Halo‘s former top rival in the first-person shooter market. That’s right: Activision is making Halo from now on. Microsoft has stripped Halo Studios for parts, eating hundreds of layoffs amid Microsoft’s restructuring. The crew that remains will be purely on upkeep duty for the current Halo games already out in the universe. Given Halo‘s troubled development cycle for the past several years, some fans hope this could breathe new life into the franchise. However, those who don’t care for how Activision runs Call of Duty are dreading the transfer.

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The restructure comes under the guidance of new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. Asha Sharma has used the word ‘reset’ to describe the 1,600+ layoffs this summer. The game of musical studios doesn’t stop with Halo Studios, as Sea of Thieves developer Rare Limited, and Age of Empires developer World’s Edge are also being moved under the Activision umbrella.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Halo, Rare, and World’s Edge to Activision. It’s an honor and a responsibility that we do not take lightly. These teams and their games have inspired fans around the world for decades. For Halo, our goal is clear: make the greatest Halo game ever, worthy of its universe and legacy, while staying true to what made players love it in the first place. It is a bold ambition, one that this franchise deserves. We have already begun assembling a purpose-built team, unique in capability and talent, ready and excited to deliver this next chapter with the community.” —Rob Kostich, President of Activision

Microsoft continues to be an anti-trust clusterf*ck nightmare, while not seeing any meaningful financial gain from their rapid consumption of the video game market. Perhaps they’re looking to balance out the literal hundreds of billions of dollars they’re spending on AI data centers. Still, with franchises like Fallout and Halo under their belts, maybe Microsoft’s vision of an even bigger juggernaut era in the games industry isn’t out of reach. Because they can’t just make some money—they need to make ALL the money. But who knows? Maybe we’ll get a good Halo game out of the deal, hopefully not plagued by the issues and delays that hampered Halo: Infinite.

Jess Harshbarger writes about movies, books, TV, games, comics, and all things nerdy for Nerdist.

The post Microsoft Hands HALO to Activision After Hundreds of Layoffs appeared first on Nerdist.

Republicans are massively outspending Democrats in a desperate bid to hold on to their House and Senate majorities, with President Donald Trump’s super PAC and other outside groups financed by the GOP’s billionaire benefactors running hundreds of millions in ads slamming their Democratic opponents as dangerous radicals. But even Republicans are admitting that their cash advantage is not the…

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A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | White House press ban renders Trump speechless…

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President Trump couldn’t stop raving about his planned White House ballroom while taking questions from reporters alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy Tuesday at the United Nations. 

Trump was bragging about “one of the papers reporting” that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to the White House later this week was “the hottest ticket that they’ve seen in a long time.”

“Almost as hot as when Zelenskiy comes into town,” Trump said to laughs, to which Zelenskiy quipped, “I’m glad,” as Trump chuckled and playfully patted the Ukrainian president’s knee.  

Trump lamented the fact that his White House ballroom was not ready yet, otherwise he could have hosted 2,000 people for the occasion. When a reporter asked if Trump would bring Zelenskiy to the ballroom for a future visit, Trump replied, “Well, we might have that, yes.… It’s under budget and ahead of schedule.” 

Trump: "I wish we had the ballroom" (look at Zelenskyy's face) pic.twitter.com/YqmUQQmG8j

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 22, 2026

Throughout the exchange, Zelenskiy was struggling not to roll his eyes or look annoyed. It’s completely understandable why, as the Ukrainian leader is in the midst of leading a war against Russia’s invasion of his country and needs Trump’s support. However, Trump is more concerned about his own vanity projects, focusing much of his time and speeches on his ballroom and other unnecessary construction in Washington, D.C. 

It’s a sign that Trump’s cognitive decline is getting worse, as he is increasingly “obsessed with things that reflect glory on him,” as Dr. John Gartner, a former assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, told The Daily Beast in June. And no one is stopping Trump for wasting his time (or taxpayer dollars) on these types of projects, least of all the Supreme Court. It seems that Trump is using his remaining time in office to stroke his own ego, defying any attempts to check his power. 

Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters appeared on Fox Business Tuesday to desperately try to sell viewers on the GOP’s Titanic-level sinking ship. But if you thought that he might have a new angle of attack to combat reports that voters no longer trust Republicans on the economy, you would be wrong. “Voters have a short memory because under [President Joe] Biden…

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Qualcomm said that its new top chip can run 30B mixture-of-expert model locally

President Trump’s long, dramatic relationship with billionaire Elon Musk seems to be back on good terms, as the president just bought and sold tens of thousands of dollars in the tech tycoon’s SpaceX rocket company.

Financial disclosures the president signed earlier this month reveal that he purchased between $15,001 and $50,000 worth of SpaceX shares on July 10 and sold between $1,001 and $15,000 ⁠in shares on July 17. SpaceX holds multiple federal contracts and is set to make millions of dollars off of them—yet Trump is allowed to buy and sell shares because he claims that his investments are managed by an independent third party.

This also reveals that even as Trump and Musk’s personal and political relationships have been exceptionally rocky, their financial one remains strong.

The president made over 1,100 stock trades this July totaling between $79 million and $270 million, according to a CNBC analysis. The biggest transactions were sales of up to $25 million in Amazon and Microsoft, as well as smaller sales in Oracle and Nvidia. Previous presidents would either divest or use blind trusts or diversified funds to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest. But Trump is well past that.

Even Donald Trump’s most loyal political disciples are jumping off the president’s sinking ship.

Florida Representative and Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds dropped all mentions of Trump from his campaign website Tuesday, peeling himself away from the president’s wake for the first time.

Donalds’s campaign materials were previously littered with mentions of Trump, according to recent versions of the page saved by the Internet Archive Project. Prior to the change, Donalds wore the president’s endorsement like a badge. “Chip in to Support Trump Endorsed Byron Donalds,” read the top of Donalds’s website.

“ENDORSED BY PRESIDENT TRUMP!” the page used to emphasize in a bright yellow banner. “TRUMP-ENDORSED Proven Conservative Fighter. BYRON DONALDS.”

Donalds also removed an image of himself and his wife, Erika Donalds, standing beside Trump.

Instead, Trump’s full-throated endorsement was severely downgraded, turning into just another voice in a large choir of conservative support backing Donalds. “RUN, BYRON, RUN!” the side-scrolling placard currently reads, quoting the president’s 2025 comments in which he reworked a famous line from Forrest Gump to support Donalds’s candidacy.

Donalds also refashioned his campaign priorities, shifting them away from MAGA talking points. The list previously mentioned “Enact[ing] the Trump Agenda” as Donalds’s chief priority, reported The Miami Herald. Today, that line only mentioned affordability.

Before, the second line item promised that Donalds would “Fight Illegal Immigration.” Now, Donalds pledges to “stop taxpayer handouts to illegal immigration”—though the promise’s placement has been demoted to a tangential issue under his seventh listed priority, “Law and Order.”

The three-term Floridian lawmaker had done quite a lot to curry the president’s favor. Most notably, he voted against certifying the 2020 election vote in Arizona and Pennsylvania. He has repeatedly spread the MAGA conspiracy that there was election fraud in those states, long after state officials found no evidence of fraud.

In the years since the far right’s attempted insurrection on Capitol Hill, Donalds has refused to declare whether he would have certified the 2020 results if he were in former Vice President Mike Pence’s shoes. When asked at an Axios event in 2024 how he would handle the situation if he were the vice president during a future presidential election, Donalds said he would not do so if he believed state officials had violated election laws.

That same year, Donalds’s ex-wife Bisa Hall spoke out publicly against him for grandstanding for the president, claiming that Donalds had always been “very opportunistic” and that Donalds’s willful participation as a “poster child” for the MAGA movement “makes some people feel better about Trump.”

If that’s true, then Donalds’s break means Trump may soon have little to convince the masses that there’s anything good about him at all.

Apple may be developing a new fitness tracker as part of its new generation of hardware devices.

Kalshi, one of the largest U.S. prediction markets, is asking the Trump administration to help it attract more big bettors.

In a filing with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Tuesday, the company’s internal clearing house Kalshi Klear sought approval to offer margin trading on event contracts, CNBC reported.

If Kalshi is permitted to offer margin trading, then traders will be able to borrow funds from the company itself in order to gain or lose more than they invest—potentially exposing investors to a dangerous level of financial risk.

The addition of margin trading is viewed as crucial for attracting bigger institutions that already use the practice on traditional stocks and futures.

While sportsbooks derive their profit from losing bets by their customers, Kalshi gets its revenue from transaction fees for each wager placed. Bigger bettors means bigger bets, and more money for the house.

State gaming commissions have always limited credit given to bettors on sporting events contracts, but prediction market companies have argued that their sports-related products are the same thing as derivatives, and therefore can only be regulated by the CFTC. Michael Selig, the commissioner of the CFTC, has readily come to the defense of prediction markets.

A Kalshi spokesperson told CNBC that the company would refrain from allowing margin trading on sports-related event contracts, as well as on culture and the “mention” markets. Rather, the company said that margin trading would be applied to markets with expiration dates that are far in the future. As the expiry date approaches, the price to obtain this leverage would increase. The service would only be available to traders who use Kalshi Klear.

Meta says Muse was built from scratch, but acknowledges the AI assistant was "heavily inspired" by OpenClaw — down to some of its workspace filenames and content.

President Trump thinks the answer to skepticism about artificial intelligence is to try and change its name.

At the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday, Trump told the audience that the “United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now.”

“Here and after officially called ‘super intelligence’ changing the name and that the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake, it’s actually amazing, but we have to be careful,” Trump said. “In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports.”

Trump said that all U.S. government documents “and hopefully the world’s” would be changed to mention “super intelligence” instead of “artificial intelligence.”

Trump tells the UN he is officially changing the name of Artificial Intelligence to "Super Intelligence" and says all US government documents will now be changed to refer to "SI" pic.twitter.com/LEWbc5tn3B

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 22, 2026

“In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence—S.I. Let’s see if that goes. It sounds much better, it is much better, and it’s much more accurate,” Trump said, before ominously hinting that he’d push hard for it. “Let’s see if I have any power. Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t. We’re gonna find out pretty soon.”

Trump appears to have gotten “super intelligence” from a poll he put on his Truth Social account Monday, in which he asked his followers, “Which name do we like for the new phenomena—SUPER INTELLIGENCE VS. SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCE? President DONALD J. TRUMP.” “Super intelligence” won the very unscientific poll of his fan base by 30 percent.

It’s unclear why Trump believed this would be a good use of his time at the United Nations, but if he thinks trying to change “artificial intelligence” to “super intelligence” is going to win over an American public increasingly opposed to corporate misuse of AI and the proliferation of data centers, he is severely mistaken. All that this lame rebranding attempt will do is open the president—and the U.S.—up to more ridicule.

The campaign arm of the far-right House Freedom Caucus announced to Fox News Tuesday that it’s launching a $6 million campaign to falsely portray a “budding socialist insurgency on the left,” in a bid to hold the GOP’s congressional majority. The Freedom Caucus Fund will buy ads in six congressional districts that are currently held by Republicans. “Each of their opponents are far-left…

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President Trump’s rambling, combative speech Tuesday to the United Nations General Assembly saw him return to his most serious quagmire yet—the war in Iran—telling world leaders that he was considering completely destroying the country as a means to end the conflict he launched alongside Israel in February.

“Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?” Trump pondered aloud, claiming that Iran’s leadership had rejected multiple peace deals with the US.

He said little about the terms of those offers—and nothing about the US and Israel’s explosive role in the Middle East, from Iran and the Gulf to Gaza and beyond.

The Center for International Policy’s Matt Duss, a former Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) foreign policy adviser, said in a statement that Trump’s threats were “dangerously unhinged” and “must be unequivocally rejected.”

“Such rhetoric is not merely reckless, it is a criminal threat of genocide against an entire nation,” Duss wrote. “U.S. lawmakers and U.S. partners around the world should condemn Trump’s remarks.”

The president again framed his demand as centering on Iran’s nuclear program, despite offering up a shifting litany of goals and terms on which he’d end the war across the last seven months, and implied that scorched earth was the only alternative. But American operations in Iran have brought an uncompromising government to power, limited the Iranian president’s power to enforce any deal, and made nuclear containment on the level of the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action virtually impossible for the indefinite future.

But it’s the tens of thousands of people who have been killed since the first US-Israeli strikes in February, and the communities whose essentials like food, water, and energy continue to be destroyed, who have faced the worst consequences—and who didn’t earn a mention in Trump’s speech beyond the threat of complete destruction.

President Trump and his aide Nataie Harp are the targets of a new lawsuit over the “Truth API” program, which offers Truth Social users early access to the posts from government officials for $100,000-a-month.

The suit was filed last Thursday by watchdog groups American Oversight and Campaign for Accountability, who argue that the president is essentially running a pay-to-play scheme, offering crucial information that impacts global markets and policy decisions to the highest bidder.

“Information the Trump Administration disseminates on Truth Social through its official accounts can have significant consequences for the global economy,” the suit reads.

Harp is named as defendant, as the lawsuit recognizes her as “the primary White House staffer responsible” for posting for Trump on Truth Social.

“President Trump and members of his administration are exploiting their offices to benefit a private company owned by the President, his family members, and allies,” said Samuel Davis, an attorney at Gerstein Harrow, LLP working on the suit. “This brazen scheme is illegal many times over and is an affront to the basic principle that the government exists to serve the people, not to enrich cronies and insiders.”

On Monday, the city of San Francisco followed up with its own lawsuit, arguing that Truth API is a “corrupt business scheme” that violates federal laws against insider trading as well as California’s Unfair Competition Law. That lawsuit targets Trump Media & Technology group, and does not mention Harp specifically.

Trump has yet to respond to news of either lawsuit.

The theft of agents' personal information could present a major counterintelligence threat, where agents and their families are extorted into cooperating with a foreign government.

Quick Take

• Lanterns on HBO Max is doing almost everything I didn’t want from a Green Lantern adaptation. But it’s such good television, it doesn’t matter.
• Lanterns takes one of DC’s most cosmic concepts and grounds it on Earth. Normally, that wouldn’t work, but on Lanterns it all plays out beautifully.
• Nerdist’s take: Even though Lanterns isn’t adapting Green Lantern comics in the most obvious way, the excellent execution makes it so we don’t really care all that much.

Lanterns on HBO Max turned into the surprise hit of the year, and coming at a crucial moment for DC Studios. It’s one of the highest-rated comic book series in HBO’s history, and has received glowing reviews almost across the board. Especially for its leads, Kyle Chandler (Hal Jordan) and Aaron Pierre (John Stewart). It single-handedly revived a DC Comics brand considered toxic (outside of comics) for fifteen years. And yet, this series is not at all what I wanted from a Green Lantern-centric show. But it proves that sometimes getting what you didn’t know you needed is better than getting what you asked for.

HBO Max/DC Studios

Although Green Lantern isn’t my favorite DC Comics series, it’s definitely one I’ve kept gravitating to over the years. And like most readers, I’d cite writer Geoff Johns’ nine-year stretch on the character as Green Lantern’s defining run. It’s big, it’s grand, it features aliens and cosmic entities, murderous space robots and ancient prophecies. It’s one of the best DC Comics series of the 2000s, and one I always hoped to see adapted in live-action properly. Alas, what we got was the 2011 Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern movie, and it killed the franchise in live-action for fifteen years.

Every piece of early promotion for Lanterns filled me with dread. Yes, I knew the pedigree of the creative team was fantastic. Damon Lindelof, the man behind Watchmen, Lost, and The Leftovers? Tom King, writer of Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow and Vision? Chris Mundy, of Ozark and True Detective fame? These are guys with fantastic credentials. But everything I saw kept making me think of one of the most disappointing TV series DC adaptations of recent years, Titans. The Titans vibes were all over this project, and it filled me with dread.

HBO Max/DC Studios

Like Green Lantern, DC Comics’ Teen Titans is a series that is often big and cosmic. It may be led by urban vigilante Nightwing, but its membership includes an alien princess, a half-demon witch, and a green dude who turns into animals. Yet, the producers of that series looked at the source material and said, “This needs a gritty, realist approach. One with few costumes and lots of f-bombs.” The resulting show somehow made it to four seasons, and putting it mildly, it never became a fan-favorite. Whether you loved Teen Titans from the cartoons or the comics, the live-action show felt like it was constantly trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

John P. Johnson/HBO

On paper, Lanterns looked like more of the same thing as Titans. A “grounded” (cheaper to produce) take on very fantastical material. Unlike with Titans, there was at least some precedent for this in the Green Lantern comics. Namely, the revolutionary 1970s Green Lantern/Green Arrow run by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, which introduced John Stewart. But what I wanted, and what most fans wanted, was not a Green Lantern series where the characters were so Earthbound, and barely wore costumes or used their powers. To many fans, this sounded like exactly the wrong approach.

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Yet the creative team on Lanterns somehow pulled it off. Despite “not being what I wanted,” it’s incredibly well-acted and well-written. Everyone involved is on their A-game, and somehow the “True Detective meets DC Comics” angle worked. Sometimes, a piece of art doesn’t deliver what you want, but gives you what you never knew you needed. And what’s amazing is that Lanterns does it all without disrespecting the original source material.

HBO Max/DC Studios

Everything fans know and love about Green Lantern is (basically) still canon, even if you don’t see it onscreen often. In other words, you can fit a square peg into a round hole as long as the writing and acting are on point and there’s a compelling story to tell. If the creators actually have something to say. And they do have something to say—about age, race, masculinity, and both family and societal pressures. If you can deliver those things successfully, my “nerd needs” become secondary.

HBO Max/DC Studios

Of course, no matter how good it all is, as a DC Comics fan, I still bump up against some of the choices made here. The exact same show could have been delivered with some more actual Lantern powers on display. This show almost feels terrified of showing the Lanterns using their powers, as if it’s the early 2000s, an era when comic book movies were afraid to use bright colors and comics-accurate visuals. And where are the aliens? They talk about Mogo and Ch’p and Abin Sur, but everything non-terrestrial is strictly off-camera. A grounded show can maintain its grounding and not feel so embarrassed by its source material to this extent.

Nerdist’s take: If Lanterns Is a Good Show, That’s Ultimately What Matters Most

But at the end of the day, with Lanterns being so good in its execution, these are quibbles. If you’re not open to a quality series just because it’s not exactly what you imagined in your mind, then all you’re being is closed-minded and having a tantrum. And Green Lantern super fans should maybe stop making angry posts, and acknowledge that Lanterns has given credibility back to one of DC’s most important properties after the movie killed it and buried its corpse. It also means that more comics-accurate versions can arrive later, and they won’t automatically be met with collective eye rolls from the general audience. But all that aside, if it’s good TV, then that’s all that should matter in the end. And we’re lucky, because Lanterns makes for very good TV. Sometimes, that’s enough.

Eric Diaz is a staff writer at Nerdist and a Swiss Army knife of fandoms. Eric loves DC, Marvel, horror movies, and even Star Wars and Star Trek equally.

The post LANTERNS Is So Good, It Silenced My Inner Comic Nerd Complaints appeared first on Nerdist.