Despite a vast mythology that includes some of the greatest comic books ever written, Warner Bros. and DC have never figured out how to produce compelling films about any of their marquee characters outside of Superman and Batman. The biggest disappointment in the company’s history was 2011’s Green Lantern, an inert origin story for Hal Jordan, the first canonical human to become a member of the intergalactic crime-fighting organization known as the “Green Lantern Corps.” What stalled subsequent attempts to reboot the character was that the vastness of a space opera, while enthralling in the pages of a graphic novel, was challenging to bring to life on the big screen. In a film, some aspects of practicality are necessary for emotional grounding, and a majority of the characters in Green Lantern comics are aliens. Green Lantern comics take place on different planets, but not the vaguely terrestrial ones seen in Star Wars and Star Trek. Outside of Jordan (who’s masked-up most of the time), a faithful Green Lantern film would be populated by CGI creatures and environments, and might as well have been animated.
There have been more traditional Green Lantern stories brought to life in animated shows and direct-to-VOD films, and so there was room for a live-action adaptation to develop a bold reinvention with its own unique aesthetics. The biggest hook for Lanterns, the latest Sunday night series from HBO, is the plural in the title. “Green Lantern” is not an alter-ego like Wonder Woman or The Flash, but a title given to the protectors of the universe. In Lanterns, Jordan isn’t the fresh-faced rookie played by Ryan Reynolds in the 2011 film, but a grizzled, self-destructive veteran portrayed by Kyle Chandler. Jordan was a hero when he first revealed himself to Earth, but he’s coasted on that reputation to become a washed-up cynic, vaguely inspired by Sam Shepard’s portrayal of Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. He’s now training a younger recruit, John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), who’s his partner and eventual replacement.
Lanterns was proclaimed by creators Damon Lindelof and Chris Mundy as DC’s version of True Detective, and that’s not just a marketing trick to indicate that adults can watch a superhero show. Even if it weren’t for the curses and bloody killings, Lanterns would be a more mature take on comic book mythology because it’s an investigative thriller, and not an action spectacle. The only hint of wonder in the pilot episode is a brief flashback to 1996, where a young version of Stewart (Cairo Cash Lee) is enamored by Jordan’s appearances on television. The magic of seeing a superpower is evaporated when it's revealed that Stewart’s militaristic father (Sherman Augustus) has put him through a brutal training regime so that he’ll be the only viable candidate to be Earth’s next Lantern. Stewart’s reality is made even bleaker when, in 2016, he’s a subordinate to Jordan, who’s stepped into alcoholism and shown no interest in passing along his knowledge.
Telling a small story within a sizable universe is a conceit that Lanterns has pushed to its extreme, given that any coincidences regarding Stewart, Jordan, and a murder mystery set in Rushville, Nebraska are far from serendipitous. Jordan anticipated that an alien subject would show up in the rural state based on the circumstances in which he obtained the ring, which suggested that a “backwater” planet like Earth would become a haven for extraterrestrial refugees. It’s also no accident that Jordan and Stewart, two men with difficult relationships with their fathers, find themselves in a closely-knit town where everyone’s connected. Jordan’s love interest, Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly MacDonald), is the estranged wife of lawyer Billy Macon (Jason Ritter), a skeevy lawyer whose father William (Garret Dillahunt) has amassed a private militia. The Macons’ private army, cultivated outside of both local and intergalactic government surveillance, is a direct response to the threat of sleeper cells. In case being set in a red state in 2016 wasn’t indication enough, Lanterns’ political subtext is clear from William’s musings about “illegal aliens.”
The weaving of political commentary into superhero stories has been historically unsuccessful, especially when the last few years of Marvel and DC comics are considered. The difference with Lanterns is that none of it’s allegorical; in this universe, the animosity felt towards aliens is an authentic reaction of powerful dynasties resistant towards the idea that they’re not alone in the universe. The 2016 setting was, in theory, a way to tie Lanterns into the broader DC Universe created by James Gunn because it’s set before the events of last year’s Superman film. It’s also used to set up a broader mystery, set in a post-Superman 2026, where the murder of a high-profile member of the Green Lantern Corps. has reunited Kerry and Stewart for another case.
That Lanterns is such a stylistic deviation from everything else made under Gunn’s regime at DC is positive, but the show’s success is its understanding of what makes a good television show. That might seem simplistic, but it’s remarkable how many streaming shows (especially those involving superheroes) are structured like films that were stretched out into eight episodes. Lanterns is a weekly mystery told across three timelines, each separated by a decade, but the heart of the show is the buddy cop dynamic between Stewart and Jordan.
Pierre has great presence as a fundamentally honorable, straight-laced military recruit who doesn’t grasp that the Green Lanterns exist in a legal gray zone. As for Chandler, it’s a creative reinvention of the character of Jordan as an arrogant, dry-witted scoundrel, but not one with the smug self-satisfaction that Reynolds brought to the role. Chandler’s one of television’s most consistent actors, and there’s a nice home in Lanterns involving Jordan on a football field that’s an obvious reference to his most famous role as Coach Taylor on Friday Night Lights.
Popular culture has moved past the point in which a comic book adaptation can sell itself based purely on iconography alone, which is something DC Studios learned this summer when Supergirl became one of the biggest box office bombs in history. The decision to make Lanterns into “True Detective with space cops” might’ve been a smart market-correction; True Detective had one of the best single seasons of television in HBO history, but the show declined in quality with each subsequent installment. There’s likely going to be some sort of backlash against “not your dad’s Green Lantern,” but the obsession with superheroes and multiverses has already served infantilized audiences for over a decade. The rare comic book show aimed at adults isn’t just a breath of fresh air, but a cultural reimbursement.