Lanterns is HBO’s new take on the foundational DC Comics hero Green Lantern, re-imagined as a moody detective story set in small-town Nebraska and also outer space. The eight-episode series stars Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre as Hal Jordan and John Stewart, the two best-known Green Lanterns in Justice League fandom. But if your first introduction to Green Lanterns was Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner in 2025’s Superman, no harm nor foul. Even amongst comics nerds, Green Lantern is sort of a niche.
The pilot episode’s brief lore explainer refers to the Green Lantern Corps as “space cops,” and that’s probably still the most efficient way to describe them. Each Green Lantern patrols a sector of the universe with a rather broad mandate to right wrongs, keep peace, fight evil robots, etc. Every Lantern is armed with a green ring which can create glowy green constructs of basically anything its wielder can imagine. The extraordinarily versatile ring is only limited, as with so much of modern life, by its battery charge, which has to be replenished regularly from a lantern-shaped power source about the size of a football.
Like the fondly-remembered Arrow, Lanterns drops the “Green” from its title to invite audiences into a world more brooding and introspective than its animated predecessors. It’s no secret that Lanterns takes True Detective as a tonal template, along with strong nods to other highly-stylish crime thrillers like No Country For Old Men and Silence of the Lambs. The genre-mashed result strays pretty far from normal superhero territory, which in Lanterns’ case is a big plus. Superhero-movie fatigue is real, and one proven workaround is intaking grafts from other recognizable genres, cf. Winter Soldier a.k.a. What If… Captain America Was In The Parallax View? a.k.a. That Superhero Movie That’s Really Excellent Even To Non-Nerds.
While I’m digressing, a personal privilege point: The Green Lantern ring is, with apologies to Ariana, one of my seven favorite things in the DC Universe1. So I’m slightly biased toward Green Lantern anything. It’s not like that 2011 Ryan Reynolds movie was even so awful, it was just comics-faithful to a fault and thus directionless on a big screen. Lanterns goes hard the other way, not simply because there’s more sex and cursing and a bit of gore.
The central homicide-investigation plot revolves around the small town of Rushville, Nebraska. The rural setting, with its stark dune fields and splendid golden light, is a refreshing change from the usual New York-iness. As revealed in the trailer, John and Hal learn that the main threat to the townfolk involves shadowy extraterrestrial shape-shifters called Manhunters. Completing the law-enforcing love-hate triangle is the local sheriff Kerry Kane, played by Kelly Macdonald, delightful as ever and perhaps channeling a bit of Marge from Fargo. Poorna Jagannathan and Garrett Dillahunt round out the main cast as two mysterious local… um… Rushvillians.
Aaron Pierre’s is the real standout performance in Lanterns, which takes pains to show the conflicting worlds of John Stewart’s life and how he navigates them. Ex-soldier, artsy architect, Black man visiting small-town middle America. His parents’ expectations weigh on him in a way uniquely related to his current assignment as the deferent Green-Lantern-in-training. His brother mockingly calls him “Chosen,” a funny jab at the supposed honor of being selected as ringbearer. Pierre is magnetic throughout, subtly communicating every small adaptation or codeswitch John uses to get through his life of micromanaged emotions, all towards getting the super-job for which the one requirement is to show no fear. And he’s kinda funny, too. Although Pierre never dons a mask, he gives probably the finest screen portrayal of what gaining (and maintaining) a secret identity would actually look like.
For Hal Jordan’s part, he’s sort of a tragic exaggeration of the hero-type we’ve always been told Hal Jordan is: Fearless, plan-less, maverick fighter pilot, nothing to lose because he has nobody. As Sheriff Kane observes, “He’s not fearless. He’s lonely.” Chandler lets us see the stumbling poignancy in Hal’s state, adding wry irony to the fact that the most powerful object in the universe is assigned to this guy.
If this all sounds a bit grim, it’s not not grim. It’s really an interesting show.
It’s worth mentioning that Lanterns builds on the potential of HBO’s exemplary Watchmen series, both featuring Damon Lindelof as a head creative voice. It’s hard to remember now, because Watchmen came out in 2019 and then 2020 happened, and questions like “What is the creative cure for fatigue from superhero movies?” just weren’t real important questions for a while. But Watchmen the HBO show really was that cure, in that it offered an audacious re-imagining of the source story that was faithful to the spirit of Watchmen while not at all “accurate” to the book. That was gutsy, ridiculously well-written stuff.
As of this writing I’ve seen seven of the series’ eight episodes, so I don’t know how it resolves. Be advised that the first three episodes are a fairly slow burn, which works because the actors are appealing and the writing and direction is sharp, dotted with moments of DCU-specific meta-hilarity. Then around Episodes 4 and 5, it takes a turn for the substantially weird, with a few scenes that are jarringly gruesome. The frictive relationship between John, Hal, and Rushville escalates in a surprising way that is not at all straight superhero stuff. I’m still not really sure how the twist lands with me as a comics fan, but I can say that it cleverly engages the question of what would happen if such a supremely powerful ring existed on Earth, and how “fearless” men might behave in proximity to it.
As with the pivotal Watchmen episode “This Extraordinary Being,” the turn toward grimdark reality seemingly threatens to undo the whole project of the show about magical space lanterns, but it’s still a more intriguing threat than the customary killer-alien-drone-whatever-horde, and hey, maybe we’ll still get one of those in the finale.
As mentioned, there’s plenty of meta-connective tissue with No Country For Old Men (Garrett Dillahunt and Kelly Macdonald, menacing Guy with bowl haircut) and one can’t help but feel that the football references are riffing on Chandler’s famous role in Friday Night Lights. And I don’t mean to imply that it overplays its similarities to True Detective (which had a goodly share of comic book references, remember) except in the sense that it’s also an affecting exploration of the buddy-cop trope which creates and sustains an unusually desolate mood, sparingly punctuated with bursts of omnipotent light.
All this is helped by Stephanie Economou’s evocative score, which gives Lanterns a distinctive musical identity apart from its DC Universe sibling shows. Partly influenced by ’90s grunge rock motifs, one can hear some Alice in Chains, Violator-era Depeche Mode kinda vibes amidst spooky alien textures. Whether intentional or not, it makes for a cool pairing with Reznor’s excellent score for the Watchmen show.
Oh, and the oath. Hey, I’m a fan of the Green Lantern oath too, and it is sprinkled tastefully throughout the show, although not as often as the recurring refrain, “Are you afraid?” I’ll tell you, some of us were a bit afraid of a new Green Lantern show, since, as mentioned, Green Lantern is a niche. Weirder than Batman, not quite as relatable as Superman. It gets down to whether you accept the unique mythology involving the ring and the lantern and the emotionally-powered plasma constructs, and Lanterns succeeds in making a case for the audience to accept all of that, by focusing on John and Hal as grounded, conflicted humans with heroic tendencies. Will the casual fans or the “only-Batman” audiences accept it? It may take an act of will, if you will.
Lanterns’ first episode premieres Sunday, August 16 on HBO Max.
- My other six Favorite DC Things, because no one asked, in no particular order: Batgirl, Simone and Scott’s Secret Six, SSKTJL, Watchmen, Atom penetrating Darkseid’s eyehole in JLA #14 (1998), Captain Carrot and The Zoo Crew. ↩︎
