The year is 1996. Hal Jordan is Earth’s first Green Lantern. He’s on 60 Minutes, revealing his identity to the world in full green costume. He’s an Air Force test pilot with a tragic backstory turned “space cop” who protects the planet, this whole sector of the galaxy, from extraterrestrial threats. He’s “a regular person like you,” except for one thing: He is fearless.
The year is 2006. Hal Jordan is Earth’s first Green Lantern. He’s older, but friendly and dutiful. He’s backing up his consciousness per the usual procedure, the last time he will do so for at least ten years.
The year is 2016. John Stewart is Earth’s second Green Lantern, or will be once Hal Jordan finishes training him. That may take a while. Hal is bitter, reckless, irresponsible, sarcastic, egomaniacal, and territorial in the extreme. Green Lantern is his gig and no one else’s — not on Earth, anyway — and he’s in no hurry to train his own backup/successor.
The year is 2026. John Stewart is Earth’s second Green Lantern. Hal Jordan, its first, is frozen to death in the stands of a Nebraska high school football stadium.
Written by series co-creators Chris Mundy (Ozark), Damon Lindelof (Lost), and Tom King (a veteran of both DC Comics and the CIA), HBO‘s Lanterns is a superhero mystery. On the surface, the mystery is why a pack of aliens in human form got in a shootout at that football stadium. More compelling, however, is the question of how Hal Jordan went from all-American hero in 1986 to huge asshole in 2016 to dead in 2026.
As a pilot episode (though the word “Pilot” has a double meaning here), there’s a lot of getting-to-know-you getting done here. In addition to everything we learn about Hal’s personality and past (his dad was a test pilot too until he died in a crash, making test pilot an…interesting choice of occupation for his son), we see that John had a military father who was arguably even more intense. From a young age he appears to have been training John to take over as Green Lantern by shooting apples off his head William Tell/William S. Burroughs–style, to train him to have no fear.
Hal does not want to be training this guy, despite their similar backgrounds. He keeps ditching him, sometimes from the driver’s seat of a moving car, forcing him to scramble to use the ring just to stay alive. Arguably, forcing him to fly to Nebraska the hard way while Hal himself takes to the sky with his ring is even crueler.
Hal’s in a hurry because of the message his old ring-stored self delivered to him via John: “There’s hail in Rushville, Nebraska.” This is right near the sight where the dying alien whose Green Lantern ring selected Hal to take over crashed his ship, so Hal’s been monitoring the location for threats ever since. Now there’s been a shooting at a football game, only nobody seems to know or care about the victims, who are all from the visiting side.
Hal immediately runs afoul of the local sheriff, Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald), who insists the GLs have no jurisdiction since there’s no reason to suspect the victims are aliens. But Hal’s been doing this a long time, and his gut feeling pays off: When he’s finally able to interrogate the one “visiting team fan” who didn’t get killed, the guy outs himself as an alien bringing war to our barbaric planet, then blows himself up. Only Hal’s nearly-depleted power ring saves the day.
But in the 24 hours the Lanterns are in town, a lot more than that goes down. Hal gets himself arrested by provoking a bar fight (he plays Melanie’s “Brand New Key” a few too many times on the jukebox) in a vain attempt to be put in a cell next to the suspected alien. John gets picked up by a gorgeous woman (Poorna Jagannathan) for a very hot quickie in his rental car.
At Hal’s arraignment, a clever young lawyer named Billy Macon (Jason Ritter) shows up to represent him. He’s also Sheriff Kerry’s wife…and the son of the very rich local militia leader, William Macon (Garret Dillahunt). A big fan of the Lanterns, Macon Sr. explains that the gunmen roaming his Yellowstone-like ranch are preparing to repel literal alien invaders, as in ETs. He’s hoping for Hal’s help. He’s also married to Zoe, the beautiful woman John slept with, and he knows that it happened somehow.
Whatever’s about to go down, I assume it goes down well enough, because when John arrives back in town to examine Hal’s frozen body ten years later, he and Kerry act like close old friends. Does that mean Hal was outside their circle of trust by this point, more alone now even than he was when Kerry clocked his so-called fearlessness as loneliness ten years earlier?
Now that it’s here, I can see why this Lanterns project wound up on the small screen rather than the big one. It feels very TV, a hodgepodge of popular shows and genres and influences. Like a lot of television over the past decade-plus, from Fargo to Dutton Ranch, it’s set in a conservative environment west of the Mississippi. There’s a harried heroine trying to do the right thing in a brown uniform. The mystery box, the police procedural, the big-sky drama — it’s all here.
But what it reminds me of the most, with its mismatched buddy cops and its time jumps and its conspiratorial mystery involving hidden truths about the world and who runs it, is True Detective. Like that show, Lanterns generates titanic amounts of goodwill just by virtue of its charismatic, attractive leads, Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre, whose insanely piercing eyes they had to cover with contacts to make him look like a normal person and not a Greek god.
They’re matched in this department by Macdonald and, especially in this episode, Jagannathan as Zoe, whose sexual chemistry with Pierre’s John is instantaneous and instantly convincing. (He lights her cigarette with his ring! Oooh-whee!) Dillahunt’s bearded, MAGA-coded anti-alien big-timer commands the screen when he’s on it, too.
To put it into the context of superhero comics, Lanterns is very much a ’00s-style “superheroes-plus” story, the idea back then being that superheroes were unpopular, but other genres were not, so you just mash them together and enjoy the results. The plus in this “superheroes-plus” story is “a True Detective–style unlikely buddy cops in rural America murder mystery.” It’s the kind of slow, down-to-earth thing superhero fans reared on Bendis and Brubaker are likely to enjoy.
Could I have done without the interrogation scene hinging on verbal product placement for Harry Potter, WBD’s transphobia-funding boy-wizard cash cow? Oh, you bet. I also think individual creators deserve credit for these characters and concepts, not “DC Comics,” which is societal construct. In this case, we have Martin Nodell and Bill Finger to thank for the original Green Lantern name and general idea, John Broome and Gil Kane for Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern superhero concept as we currently know it, and Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams for John Stewart. Print their names, and print them some money.
Other than these unfortunate bum notes (seriously, they could have picked any other book or movie in the world, and not crediting the people who made this up for you is embarrassing), Lanterns is a cleverly written show, engagingly acted by people I like watching. I’ll render my final verdict the happy moment I see a giant green boxing glove, but until then, these space cops are still worth a ride-along.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
