Lanterns Looks Like an HBO Drama and That’s a Good Thing
Lanterns looks to be courting Succession fans more than it is comic book readers.
After much hype and speculation, HBO has finally released a first look at Lanterns, the upcoming DCU show about members of the Green Lantern Corps.
As excitement for the announced teaser grew online, fans wondered what it might show. Would we see any of the strange aliens who are members of the Corps, such as the planet Mogo, the sentient math equation Dkrtzy Rrr, or the squirrel Ch’p? Would we see any of the other wielders of the emotional spectrum, the hate spewing Red Lanterns or the alluring Star Sapphire Corps? Would we see Lanterns Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) use their willpower to create incredible constructs of mech warriors or a giant baseball glove?
No. We see two humans in a regular old car driving through a dusty desert. On Earth. In decidedly not green clothes.
Obviously, Green Lantern fans haven’t been this disappointed since the last time someone on Reddit posted a panel of Hal Jordan hitting on Arisia. But the Lanterns teaser is clearly promising a standard prestige TV show instead of a space opera. And that might be okay.
Let’s be honest, Green Lantern is a tough sell to general audiences. You don’t have to be Garth Ennis, who created the character Dog Welder because it was the one name he could conjure that was dumber than Green Lantern, to recognize the high barrier of entry to a mythos about space police with wishing rings that can do anything but touch the color yellow. For as many great Green Lantern stories have been written over the years, its main bad guy is a still a dude who looks like Satan and is named Sinestro. And that’s before we get to the part where the main character has a racist nickname for his best friend, dated a 13-year-old, and once was a traveling toy salesman.
For some, like this writer, the weird parts of Green Lantern are the entire appeal and the icky stuff can be retconned away. But for regular people, who tune in to HBO on Sunday nights, the mythos is just too high a barrier of entry. They can memorize the entire map of Westeros, but they can’t tell the difference between Isamot Kol and Vath Sarn, apparently.
And so, Lanterns looks to be playing it straight. When he first announced the project, James Gunn compared the show not to E.E. Smith’s Lensmen novels, to Star Wars, or even Guardians of the Galaxy. Rather, he compared it to True Detective, and described it as a buddy cop mystery. From what we’ve seen so far, he was right. Lanterns looks more like a drama with some minor genre elements than it does anything that might involve the Weaponeers of Qward.
Still, let’s not pretend that the few things we’ve seen from Lanterns are totally incompatible to the Green Lantern comics. Desert settings have always been part of Hal Jordan’s story, from the first time he was summoned by Abin Sur in Showcase #22 (1959) and a lot of the imagery recalls the 1989 miniseries Emerald Dawn, which reestablished the franchise for a new era.
Even better, the one clip we see of Chandler’s character in action is pure Hal Jordan. Leaving a power ring on the dash, Jordan drives a car toward a cliff and bales out just before it starts to plummet, forcing Stewart to find his willpower in a hurry.
We may not see Hal creating the world’s biggest boxing glove to punch a monster back into the Anti-Matter Universe and we may not see John analyzing the situation with a complex construct, but we are seeing the Jordan and Stewart we know. The fact that they’re acting more like Rust Cohle and Marty Hart than guys in green tights might mean that regular people can enjoy them too.
Lanterns drives a regular car and not an emerald spaceship onto HBO and HBO Max in 2026.
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Joe George’s writing has appeared at Slate, Polygon, Tor.com, and elsewhere!