BW Media Spotlight

Adaptation (noun):  a written work (as a novel) that has been recast in a new form (vocabulary.com)

Here’s a question: why adapt something if you don’t care about it or the fans? Alternately, what is it about the source material that you do like and how much can you toss out before it’s no longer the same thing. Surface level people will say “this is his name, these are his powers, this is the costume” and slap it onto whatever they want to be pushing. Hollywood has a lot of surface level people, like showrunners who only want to make the story they want to tell and trick the studios into doing it because all they want are the popular IP. It’s gimmick as lazy promotion.

So for them Hal Jordan and John Stewart are just a space cop with a magic ring. Hence everything I’ve seen about HBO Max’s Lanterns In Name Only, a show that decided the best thing to do with superhero space cops with decades worth of lore, backstory, and multiversal continuity (even when DC does a minor or full reboot of the universe every few years) is to toss them and do something inspired by True Detective. I was never interested in True Detective, nor any of the other inspirations that weren’t the comics or even later animated movies and shows, so I’m holding firm to not watching this show. Nothing I’ve seen, and nothing I’ve heard from reviewers who deep dive these shows that I find trustworthy in their summaries if not their opinion, tells me this is a proper adaptation within the limits of a change of media format.

Damon Lindelof, and this shouldn’t surprise you from someone part of the SEECA crowd, thinks he knows better than the fans how to properly adapt Green Lanterns, even stating that fans don’t actually want it adapted right. Clearly this is BS on his part, but that’s what he said as part of a joint interview with Tom King, the comic writer who loves psychologically damaging DC’s heroes and is one of James Gunn’s favorite writers to the point of making him “essential” to his vision for the DC Universe. We’re going with an interview in The Hollywood Reporter that opens by discussing other adaptations, meaning contributor Brian Davids doesn’t understand adapting the comics to a TV style series, either. When you hate superhero comics, it’s easy to not care about them.

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