The vow goes a little something like this: “In brightest day, in blackest night, let those who worship evil’s might… beware my power, Green Lantern’s light!” This is the sacred oath undertaken by members of the Green Lantern Corps, an interstellar police
force some tens of thousands strong. It’s run by a cabal of celestial guardians who ensure that peace reigns not just in our galaxy, but in the gajillions of other galaxies in the infinitely vast cosmos. Each “space cop” is assigned a planet and/or region to protect, with one member per sector. Those protectors are essentially chosen by a superpowered ring, which, once the lucky duck recites the vow and fist-bumps the jewelry against a charging lantern, allows them to conjure any item they can think of. A sledgehammer, a shield, a racecar, a Howitzer — if a corp member can think it, they can summon a giant green version of it.
The capability of this item is limited only by the imagination of those who possess it. And if Tolkien taught us anything, it’s that you should always be wary of a ring capable of giving those who wear it infinite power.
On the surface, the HBO show Lanterns is your typical premium-cable procedural: There’s a crusty veteran named Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), a seen-it-all guy still coasting on his faded celebrity and his street cred, the kind who’s old enough to unironically note he’s too old for this shit. His partner — technically, his “trainee” — John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) is a rookie who’s being put through the ringer by his salty mentor. Each have had their share of knocks, some harder than others. Each find themselves thrust into a mystery that starts with a corpse and ends with uncovered secrets and a vast conspiracy. Real tip-of-the-iceberg stuff. The darkness at the edge of town keeps creeping onto Main Street. The dialogue zings between hardbitten and wisecracking. Ignore the fancy ring on Hal’s finger and his tendency to literally fly off at a moment’s notice, and you might forget you’re watching a story in which one of these law enforcement officers could plausibly have Superman on speed dial.
A key part of James Gunn and Peter Safran’s overall rehaul of the DC Extended Universe [Small-Screen Division], this spin on the sub-subgenre aims to have it both ways. Longtime fans of Green Lantern, a card-carrying Justice League member who’s technically been around since the Golden Age of comics, will get to see not one but two men who’ve donned the mask join forces. The series is designed to formally introduce these cosmos-hopping legacy characters into the new and improved DCEU. (A third Lantern Corps member named Guy Gardner has already graced a few of the universe’s outings; you’ll notice that the actor who plays him, Nathan Fillion, is listed on the show’s IMDb page.)
But viewers who can’t recite the entire history of Hawkman or don’t know Atrocitus from Abin Sur can still settle in to a drama that’s just gritty and morally complex enough to fill the prestigious Sunday-night HBO programming slot. The logline going into Lanterns, which premieres on Aug. 16, was “True Detective, but with superheroes,” and while the whole doesn’t quite add up to the sum of those peanut butter cup-style marketing parts, it’s not an entirely inaccurate description. Each of these men has his personal demons. Their partnership is a necessary but extremely uneasy one. The flavor is mystical, darkest-night noir. The biggest takeaway: It ain’t easy being green — or morally gray.
The name-dropping of HBO’s biggest anthology franchise isn’t coincidental, given that one of the three creators of Lanterns is Chris Mundy, who was an executive producer on True Detective: Night Country. His fellow showrunners are Tom King, a prolific comic-book writer (Mister Miracle, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow); and Damon Lindelof, who helped turn the network’s Watchmen series into both an exhilarating extension of Alan Moore’s award-winning book and a profound look at our country’s deeply racist past. The aims for Lanterns are far more modest than that limited series, but the pedigree spells out exactly what the show’s aiming to do.
Ditto the dual timelines (though both Jordan and Stewart get long childhood-flashback vignettes), which work off each other in way that reminds you how, multiverses or not, time is indeed a flat circle, yada yada yada. It’s 2016, and Jordan — who’s been the protector of Space Sector 2814, a.k.a. Earth’s general orbit, for decades — is training former Marine sniper Stewart in the ways of the Lantern. The younger man is supposed to be an in-case-of-emergency backup; both men are aware that “Junior,” as this reluctant mentor calls Stewart, has been quietly earmarked as a replacement for the notoriously maverick Jordan by the alien overlords who run the corps. The power of the ring may have gone to his head a bit. Cue simmering tension, passive-aggressive power plays, and the usual bickering buddy-cop banter.
The two men soon find themselves in Rushville, Nebraska, the same city where Jordan was first inducted into Green Lantern duty. A shootout during a high school football game has left a number of dead bodies on the field. Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) is none too happy to see superheroes investigating a crime scene that’s way, way out of their interstellar jurisdiction. But Jordan has a hunch that aliens are somehow involved.
So, for that matter, does William Macon (Garret Dillahunt), the local billionaire who keeps a private militia on his estate. Macon is a big fan of Jordan’s work keeping Earth safe from extraterrestrial invaders. He recalls how, when the Europeans came to this continent, it didn’t turn out so well for the indigenous population. Macon like to make sure Homo sapiens as a species don’t suffer the same fate. “Better to be the colonizers than the colonized,” he drawls. The sooner these two Lanterns can get to the bottom of what’s going on in their quaint little town, the better.
A few other things to note: There’s a hint of rom-com back and forth between Sheriff Kane, who’s married to Macon’s son (Jason Ritter), and Jordan. She clearly hates Jordan’s presence in Rushville, “but it’s the way she hates me,” as he puts it, that makes the arrogant hero think he’s got a shot. Stewart has a complicated history with his family and the whole Lanterns-duty thing. Macon’s wife, Zoe (Poorna Jagannathan), also has the hots for him, and given that this bigwig is not someone you wanna cross — well, you can see why the attraction is problematic. Jordan has a backup consciousness that lives in the Lantern Corps’ equivalent of the cloud, and the digital copy is a lot more user-friendly and helpful to Stewart than the real thing. Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen), the Lex Luthor/Joker equivalent to Jordan’s Green Lantern, makes a few brief appearances as well.
Oh, and there are these creatures known as “Manhunters.” (Not to be confused with this DC stalwart.) Initially designed to be guardians of the galaxy similar to the Lanterns, they ended up going rogue. All of them were eventually exterminated… except one. And that remaining Manhunter is right here in Rushville, hidden among the population, and will do anything to keep from being found.
Remember how we mentioned there were two timelines? Right before the end of the first episode, the show jumps to the present day. There’s another dead body that’s just popped up in Rushville, one with a deep connection to what happened when Jordan and Stewart’s snooping around begat some serious consequences 10 years ago. And it’s that storyline that proves to be the more intriguing part of Lanterns, especially when it begins to dominate the series’ back half (judging from the seven out of the eight episodes critics got to see, at least). The more True Detective-like elements work way better than the superhero stuff, which is partially due to Chandler and Pierre pairing particularly well together. The ex-Friday Night Lights star can do Flinty Yet Lovable Southern Daddy in his sleep at this point, but that doesn’t mean he’s not dialed in; the fact that he also plays Jordan’s nicer backup version allows him stretch out a bit. And anyone who’s been paying attention to Pierre over the past few years, notably his performance in 2024’s extraordinary Rebel Ridge, knows that this actor is already star material.
It’s the DCEU stuff — present enough to annoy those who would rather just watch a gritty procedural, peripheral enough to make fans of the comic wish it was more prominent — that feels like it’s dragging things down, even as it distinguishes the show from every other two-guys-one-crime story. Green Lantern may not be one of DC’s core four (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman), but he’s a major part of their roster, as recognizable to casual comic readers as the Flash. The company tried to establish Hal Jordan’s alter ego as a franchise anchor and future team player once before, and to put it in the kindest and most diplomatic terms possible, it was an unmitigated disaster.
Lanterns is a vast improvement in that respect, opting for a road-less-traveled approach that favors actual character development instead of an origin-story template, serialized narrative-arc seeding, and endless, empty VFX set pieces. Yes, things still do get blowed up real good, and real green! They just tend to do so on terra firma, with far more human stakes than usual. Yet it’s also tough to see what this offering might add to the greater intellectual-property picture, other than keeping DC’s name out there and diversifying its portfolio. Better to let the space cops play small-town gumshoes in lieu of squandering good will, perhaps.
Sometimes different is better. Other times it’s just different. Unlike their mouse-eared counterpart’s experiment in cross-genre superhero TV, this HBO series is already set for a second season, which clearly means someone in the C-suite liked it enough to put a ring on it. Let’s see if they can use that to conjure up a giant green-hued audience big enough to justify the gamble.
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