HBO’s Great New Sunday Night Show Is the Spiritual Successor to Both True Detective and Watchmen

Television The subversive, funny Lanterns is a superhero show for people who think they don’t like superhero shows. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Sam Adams? Aug 15, 20269:00 AM HBO Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Everyone loves the idea of a creator-driven franchise until the creators actually start to drive. The big dogs of American moviemaking—Marvel, DC, Star Wars—have all at various points announced their intention to let directors and screenwriters take the wheel, to craft films that have their own distinctive sensibilities rather than serving primarily as a piece in an enormous jigsaw puzzle. And time and again they’ve gotten cold feet: Marvel pushed out Edgar Wright for trying to make an Edgar Wright movie; Star Wars booted Lord and Miller; DC took not just a film but an entire universe away from Zack Snyder. If the Spider-Man and Deadpool series have bucked the trend of franchise fatigue, it’s in part because they were contractually obligated to develop in their own self-contained worlds. James Gunn and Peter Safran began their DC Universe—not to be confused with the DC Extended Universe that preceded it—with a promise we’ve heard many times before. Each movie and TV series, whether it fed into the larger continuity or not, would develop along its own lines, and that variety would be not just allowed but encouraged. Peacemaker was a gonzo satire; Supergirl, a dystopian road movie; the still-forthcoming Clayface, an unsettling body-horror flick. Gunn set the example himself, writing and directing three properties—Peacemaker, Superman, and the animated Creature Commandos—that were distinct from one another while still being distinctly his. Extending that proof of concept beyond the DCU’s co-head has been a rockier proposition. Supergirl was a muddled, muddy-looking mess, and one that, more to the point, bore signs of being tinkered with by the higher-ups. (It was, at the very least, Gunn that chose an insufferably twee cover of “The Middle” to soundtrack its climactic showdown.) And horror director Mike Flanagan’s Clayface screenplay has been rewritten by Drive’s Hossein Amini. (Gunn has said the changes are “minor.”) Another movie was scrapped entirely. Thus far the mandate to let the DCU’s creators call their own shots is working out well, but only if those creators also happen to run the studio. With Lanterns, that all changes. The series, created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King, has ties to the larger DC Universe, which grow more pronounced as its first season goes on. (Seven of the season’s eight total episodes were available to critics in advance.) But you don’t need to be familiar with the history of the Green Lantern Corps to get anything out of it—in fact, it might be better if you aren’t. King wrote the comic-book miniseries on which the Supergirl movie is based, and Lindelof was one of the prime movers behind HBO’s Watchmen, both revisionist takes on the superhero mythos (or, in Watchmen’s case, a revisionist take on a revisionist take). But Mundy is more of a wild card, a veteran of sordid TV procedurals (he did five years on Criminal Minds) who crossed over to high-gloss potboilers with Ozark and the most recent season of True Detective. (Both shows are influences, as is the Coen brothers’ snow-covered noir.) The three share writing credit on Lanterns’ pilot, but Mundy was tapped as the showrunner for the season, with Slow Horses’ James Hawes to direct the first two episodes and set the overall tone. Habitués of shows about rural American criminals and slovenly British spies don’t seem like an obvious fit for a series about intergalactic peacekeepers with glowy green rings, but that’s a big part of what makes Lanterns work. Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), who has held the title of Earth’s first Green Lantern since the 1980s, is no one’s idea of a superhero—or at least he wouldn’t be if he hadn’t saved the planet from disaster more than once. He’s sullen and unkempt and a bit of a smart-ass, and though he turns on the charm for fans—he gave up the masked identity some years past, largely because the Green Lantern suit was difficult to urinate in—it’s clear he’d rather be left alone than be showered with thanks. He’s not a brooding loner like Batman or a tortured one like Spider-Man; he’s just not crazy about other people. That goes many times over for John Stewart (Rebel Ridge’s Aaron Pierre), whom the Green Lanterns’ bosses—the Guardians of the Universe, if you want to be precise—have appointed as Hal’s backup. It’s not standard for Lanterns, who, at least in the comics, range from pink-skinned aliens to sentient planets, to have an understudy waiting in the wings, but you can see why the Guardians want to hedge their bets here. Hal is rash and unstable, and his only qualification for the job, beyond being selected by the Green Lantern ring itself, was giving the right answer to the only question that matters: “Are you afraid?” Hal, the son of an Air Force test pilot, inherited fearlessness from his flyboy father, but the ring, evidently unfamiliar with human psychology, neglected to account for the distinction between heroic courage and nihilistic recklessness. Hal isn’t brave so much as he has nothing, and no one, to lose. He’s also stubborn as hell, which comes in handy when he gets wind of a potential alien incursion in remote Rushville, Nebraska. (It’s apparently mandatory that whether he’s played by Chandler or Ryan Reynolds or Nathan Fillion, Earth’s Green Lantern is kind of a jerk.) At first, it just seems as if a couple of yokels have shot up a high school football field during a postgame brawl, but both Hal and the local sheriff, Kerry Mason (No Country for Old Men’s Kelly Macdonald), suspect there’s more to it. She’s put off by the presence of this arrogant outsider, and John, a former Marine sniper, bristles at Hal’s apparent laziness and disregard for the rules. (It doesn’t help that Hal keeps calling him “Kid,” or that his first test of whether John is fit to wield the ring involves bailing out of a speeding car and giving his trainee a few seconds to save himself while going over a cliff.) But Hal, while being an indisputable pain in the ass, is also right that there’s something untoward going on in Rushville, and that it probably involves the rich man with the cowboy hat (Deadwood’s Garret Dillahunt) who seems to be training an armed militia on his sprawling ranch. The precise nature of Rushville’s intergalactic goings-on takes several episodes to sniff out, not to mention periodic jumps backward and forward in time from the main story set in 2016. (Suffice it to say, it involves some of the comics’ most nefarious villains.) But Lanterns manages to hold on to its down-to-earth feel even when its interests shift off-world. The virtually unlimited power of the Green Lanterns’ rings, which can create essentially any object the wielder can imagine, makes grounded storytelling tricky. (Whether it’s the Eternals or the many, many attempts at the Fantastic Four, the cosmic side of superhero comics has proved especially difficult to adapt in live action.) But the show contrives a variety of ways to de-power its Lanterns. For one thing, Hal and John have only one ring between them, and Hal is not particularly eager to hand it off for even a brief spell. For another, Hal’s ring behaves more like a dying iPhone than an instrument of unlimited celestial might; it’s constantly running out of juice, even if he’s discovered that giving it a good whack can get the battery back up to 5 percent. The comics’ more fantastical lore is referenced, but it stays largely offscreen. If you’re waiting for an appearance by Mogo, the living planet, you’ll have to make do with the password Hal uses to open his safe. Hal’s relationship with John Stewart starts out as standard buddy-cop friction between a by-the-book rookie and a grizzled old-timer. But if you bristle at hearing a slouchy white man call his overqualified Black apprentice “Junior,” you’re very much meant to. Hal’s not just hazing the new guy; his resentment runs deep, and Chandler and Pierre don’t shy away from the ugliness they both know is right under the surface. (Pierre in particular has never glowered so effectively.) Fearlessness is the key quality in a Green Lantern—in the dreadful 2011 movie, the villain was the physical embodiment of fear itself—but in a world with so many genuine reasons to be afraid, a lack of fear lies somewhere on a spectrum between privilege and psychosis. Like Lindelof’s Watchmen, Lanterns tugs out the subtext until it becomes text, especially the question of whether aliens who come in shades of pink and blue are equipped to understand what the color of a Lantern’s skin means on Earth. It’s easier for comics, where it’s common for multiple titles offering different versions of a character to exist at the same time, to branch out in different directions than it is for the slow-turning battleships of a major franchise. But Lanterns manages to create something of its own, singular but not reactive, as delightful as it is thoughtful, a superhero story for people who think they don’t like superhero stories. Maybe those rings really can make magic. Comics HBO Superheroes True Detective Watchmen