Review: Lanterns, "Pilot" | Season 1, Episode 1

Welcome to Episodic Medium's coverage of HBO's Lanterns, which debuts the latest entry in James Gunn's vision for the DC TV slate. As always, this first review is free, but subsequent reviews are exclusively for paid subscribers. Support the site to stay in the conversation.

A lot has changed since the last time Damon Lindelof produced a DC show. When Watchmen premiered in 2019, Peak TV was still on the ascent, and Warner Bros. was willing to pay top dollar for a creatively ambitious superhero series that confronted racial tension in America head on. There was no allegory there; the police were literally white supremacists. At the time, HBO doing a live-action comic book adaptation was unprecedented (there was an animated Spawn in the ‘90s) and a little risky for its reputation as the home of prestige TV. But in keeping with HBO’s mandate, it was the best, most elevated version of the genre possible. The show rode its timeliness and general excellence to 11 Emmys and some of the best reviews I’ve seen in my time covering TV. 

Seven years later, the vibes have shifted hard. The Zaslav era at Warner Bros. has brought ruthless cost-cutting, a retreat from explicit progressive politics, and a general sense of risk-aversion. There have of course been exceptions, especially on the movie side with Sinners and One Battle After Another. But the TV side seems no longer willing or able to make stuff like Watchmen. HBO and HBO Max’s shows are still well-made, but the big ones are mostly spinoffs and brand extensions. It’s the home of James Gunn’s DC Universe now. An HBO superhero show comes out every year, and they’re not trying to be the best superhero show ever made. Peacemaker and The Penguin were good shows, to be sure, but they didn’t have as much to say as Watchmen. 

HBO’s new DCU series, Lanterns, is very much a product of its time—right now. It’s a good show. The dialogue is snappy, and delivered with panache by a wonderful cast assembled by the great Alexa Fogel. The special effects are cool. The mystery is engaging, and the episode-ending time-jump twist caught me by surprise. There was one moment that made me say “Oh hell yeah, they’re getting crazy with it” (more on that in a bit). But it just feels so de-risked. The “two troubled detectives investigating a possibly supernatural murder” setup is openly a True Detective homage—showrunner Chris Mundy previously worked on True Detective: Night Country—and it feels overly familiar, in a “we know this works” way (Night Country also put its dead bodies in a sports venue).

It nods toward tonal darkness, but seems unwilling to actually go there. Its plot doesn’t seem like it’s going to have much of the Twin Peaks-influenced confusion that Lindelof’s shows usually traffic in. Its politics seem unlikely to provoke much conversation. Militia leader William Macon’s (Garret Dillahunt) fear of Earth getting colonized and his comment to Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) about what he believes should be their shared goal—“How about we both want to protect the planet from anybody not born on it?—is setting up a timely allegory for conspiratorial xenophobia (”aliens will not replace us!”), but I don’t get the sense that that’s what this season is going to be about. Time will tell if this theme is surface-level or adds depth. 

To be clear, I’m not saying that Lanterns has to be overtly political to be good or smart or ambitious. I am saying, however, that when I compare it to Watchmen, it’s nowhere near as willing to engage with real life, or as narratively and stylistically audacious, or attempting to do anything as risky as remixing the consensus pick for greatest comic of all time—and pulling it off. Lanterns has more modest goals, and since it’s the new flagship superhero show, its modesty makes me a little sad. I miss Peak TV. 

Before we go any further, I should disclose that I am not a Green Lantern guy. I only learned that there were multiple Green Lanterns from reading news about Greg Berlanti’s take that ended up getting scrapped in favor of this one. But Lanterns knows that there are more people like me than Green Lantern superfans, and the pilot does a good job of telling us what we need to know to understand the world. Part of what an experienced pro like Lindelof brings to a show is the ability to make piles of exposition go down smooth enough to not feel like you’re drowning in an info-dump. What’s important is that Green Lanterns are an intergalactic police force governed by a council we haven’t seen yet, and they have rings that enable them to fly and create matter out of thin air. Lanterns is not taking a mythology-heavy approach—or at least doesn’t feel mythology-heavy—which is definitely the correct decision. The relationship between Green Lantern veteran Jordan and his trainee John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) is much more interesting. 

Casting Chandler and Pierre for these roles was the smartest thing the producers did. They’re both exceptionally charismatic performers, and their chemistry is already strong enough to keep this watchable even if the plot goes sideways, which often happens in shows like this. They’re a classic buddy cop pair with the age roles reversed. Here, the fresh-faced rookie does things by the book and the grizzled veteran is the reckless hotshot. Hal Jordan is too old to give a shit. He’s consumed with resentment—he’s given his whole life to this job he never even asked for and has little to show for it, and now they’re trying to take it away from him and hand it to some kid who is going about it all wrong. His bitterness makes him selfish, cynical, and arrogant—and funny (“A little diplomacy, a little punching, you know the drill”). He’s played by Kyle Chandler, though, so he has an inherent decency that he’s buried but is still in there. It’s Chandler’s most Jeff Bridges-esque performance to date. 

Aaron Pierre, meanwhile, is my favorite actor of his cohort. He’s been wonderful in anything I’ve seen him in, even as the hemophilic rapper Mid-Sized Sedan in that terrible movie about the beach that makes you old. His intelligence and sensitivity combined with his action hero look makes him a generational talent. He’ll have an Oscar and a movie franchise of his own within ten years. He landed the role of John Stewart a month after his starmaking movie Rebel Ridge came out on Netflix. If you’ve seen that sophisticated action flick, you know the emotional and physical range Pierre is capable of spanning. So far I’m loving his performance here as a man whose discipline is being tested by his frustration. I like the conception of the character as being like an athlete whose father molded and pushed him toward greatness from a young age, only instead of the NFL or the NBA it’s the Green Lantern Corps. Stewart is pursuing a goal that he thinks he wants, because he knows no other way, but he will soon question whether becoming Hal Jordan is truly the future he desires. His upbringing bears some similarity to Tiger Woods’, and we know how that turned out. As far as we know, though, Earl Woods never shot an apple off his son’s head to practice not being afraid. 

That William Tell moment was my favorite part of the pilot. More than anything else in the episode, it reminded me of the out-there stuff in Watchmen and The Leftovers, where Lindelof would do imaginative things that you had no idea where they were going. I hope there are more moments like that as the season progresses. 

It’s dangerous to have two mysteries in a season, because one is almost always more compelling than the other, and I fear that that’s going to happen here. I’m worried that when Stewart and Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) are investigating Jordan’s death in 2026, I’ll wish the show would hurry up and get back to 2016 so I can watch Jordan and Stewart banter. 

Lanterns has more humor than its dour premise and Bruce Springsteen-soundtracked trailer led me to believe, which is a pleasant surprise. There’s plenty of levity thanks to the witty dialogue. (“Did you just use that ring to counterfeit money?” “No. I manifested money with the power of my will.”) It never made me laugh out loud, but it’s funny enough that it feels light on its feet.

I enjoyed the first episode of Lanterns while simultaneously wishing it was better than it was. If Lanterns had been made even four years ago, it would have been bolder, but that era is over. I wish this show could have been made then. There was a time when a True Detective-inspired HBO superhero show from Damon Lindelof would have been one of the best shows on TV. I think my project this season is going to be trying to come to terms, once and for all, with the fact that Lanterns is what prestige drama is now, and whether I can accept the pretty-good shows of this less ambitious era for what they are—the best people can do under the circumstances of a contracting, fear-paralyzed industry. I would rather evaluate Lanterns for what it is rather than what I imagine it could have been. It’s only fair.

Stray observations

• Thank you for joining me on this journey to Nebraska. If you don’t know me, I’m Liam, nice to meet you. I’m the author of the newsletter Dad Shows. I’ve previously covered Bad Monkey and Peacemaker for Episodic Medium. If you remember me from those shows, hello again. It’s a pleasure to be back. 
• I always love Garret Dillahunt and really enjoyed his slimy-but-savvy performance in this episode, but he’s too young for this part, right? He’s 61 and seems younger, and this role feels like it’s written for a man in his 70s who could get away with calling Kyle Chandler “son.” He’s only 16 years older than Jason Ritter, who’s playing his son. 
• There are a lot of shows and movies in Lanterns’ DNA, both as influences and things the writers and actors have brought with them from previous work, and it’s fun to play spot-the-reference: The theme of aging out of one’s world and the presence of Macdonald and Dillahunt is from No Country for Old Men; the heartland setting and polished dialogue is from Chris Mundy’s Ozark; Macdonald’s character is a small-town cop in a distinctive hat who’s smarter than the people underestimating her, like Frances McDormand in Fargo; etc. These references don’t do Lanterns any favors in the originality department, but at least it’s stealing from the best. 
• You know what movie the creators have not cited as a reference, but actually has an amusingly similar premise? Men in Black. They’re both about a long-in-the-tooth alien investigator training his young replacement. Hal Jordan is old and busted, John Stewart is the new hotness.