My Adventures with Superman Season 3 (Episodes 1-3)

My Adventures with Superman is back for a third season after nearly two years away, and three episodes in, the time off has only sharpened it. The anime-inspired take on the mythos, airing just past midnight on Adult Swim's Toonami block before hitting HBO Max the next day, has always been warmer and looser than any other screen Superman, and season three keeps that tone while leaning hard into the xenophobia that has hummed in the background since the start, the question of whether a frightened public will ever accept the Kryptonians in its midst.

The smartest move so far is that this is not really Clark's season yet. Drawing on the Reign of the Supermen arc, the show spreads its focus, and the standout beneficiary is Kara. Kiana Madeira's Supergirl is a fish out of water, still steeped in Kryptonian custom and vernacular, and across the many screen versions, Helen Slater's 1984 take, Melissa Benoist's Arrowverse run, the new theatrical one, and Sasha Calle's appearance in The Flash, this one carves out its own space with an optimistic lightness and an almost childlike wonder. The running gag that she wants to pet every animal she meets, up to and including, when the elephant in the room gets addressed, a literal elephant is incredibly endearing.

That balance of light comedy against serious stakes is the show's whole identity. The Cyborg Superman thread is the dark center: Hank Henshaw exists because LexCorp wants a Superman it can control, and Max Mittelman voicing Lex, Hank, and Cyborg Superman all at once underscores that it is really a Lex storyline. This Lex plays as a petulant rich-boy technocrat, the DC universe's answer to Seto Kaiba, all wounded ego and overcompensating hardware. The action backs it up, the Toyman's Gundam-inspired mech getting punched out of a building, and a third-episode fight built around Superman keeping Silver Banshee alive rather than overwhelming force.

The relationship writing earns real credit for refusing the reset button. Clark has made peace with being Superman and wants to settle down, talking farmhouses and adopting a dog, and Lois, freshly minted as the Planet's star reporter, is not there, her hesitation a genuine fear of surrendering her autonomy rather than a misunderstanding to be cleared up by the credits.

The one weak spot is Jimmy, whose self-sabotaging conviction that Kara is out of his league is realistic but grating, and already wearing thin after three episodes. That quibble aside, this is the show doing what it does best, using a familiar mythology in a way nobody else on screen is, taking the serious material seriously precisely because it never pretends to be the definitive, solemn Superman. A fun ride that hasn't forgotten how to land a punch. New episodes weekly.