Los Angeles, CA – How exactly do you make the Green Lantern gritty? Anyone who has endured Martin Campbell’s campy catastrophe from 2011 knows how ludicrous that question sounds, with an earnest Ryan Reynolds rollicking through that neon-green CGI fever dream he would later spend years brazenly lampooning from the safer perch of his wisecracking antihero at Marvel. This is, after all, a character whose job description involves a magic ring, an intergalactic police force, and a battery that runs on willpower, so HBO’s decision to give him the prestige-procedural treatment by transplanting all that cosmic hokum into a True Detective-adjacent rural Americana did initially feel like another miserable indignity to inflict on this notoriously inadaptable DC superhero.
Created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and comic-book writer Tom King, with Mundy as showrunner and James Gunn and Peter Safran among its executive producers, Lanterns is clearly made by people coming at the material from very different directions. You can feel that tug throughout its eight episodes, which keep bouncing between small-town crime drama and character-heavy television, occasionally punctuated by bursts of IP mythology. Fortunately, Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre are so damn good together that they make the whole thing feel considerably more coherent than it actually is, giving the series a human core without sanding away the ridiculousness of being a Green Lantern.
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The series follows two Lanterns—one a seasoned veteran and the other a rookie—as they investigate a murder in the American heartland, a setup that grounds the cosmic mythology in earthly stakes. The contrast between Chandler’s weary, grounded presence and Pierre’s more earnest energy drives the show’s best moments, allowing the series to navigate its tonal shifts with more grace than the premise might suggest. While the show occasionally struggles to balance its genre ambitions, the central partnership proves to be its greatest asset, offering a fresh and surprisingly human take on a character long considered one of DC’s most difficult to adapt. Lanterns is currently streaming on HBO.
