Mon, August 17, 2026 at 2:00 AM UTC
You’d be forgiven for tuning in to the first episode of Lanterns and thinking you’ve fired up the wrong show. The <a href="https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a71570680/best-hbo-series-of-all-time-ranked/” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>HBO series is unmistakably about the Green Lanterns. For the uninitiated, they’re DC Comics superheroes and intergalactic cops with magical rings—which represent the wearer’s willpower, fearlessness, and most of all, the wearer’s imagination. But the show, which premiered Sunday, relies heavily on HBO prestige and police procedural tropes. It’s ironic, especially for a superhero whose powers manifest from thinking outside the box.
Lanternsfollows grizzled maverick Hal Jordan (a salt-and-peppered Kyle Chandler), who clings to his role as Earth’s first Green Lantern with a vise grip. He’s joined by trainee John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), a disciplined Marine whose monk-like focus clashes with his impatience to see Jordan retired at last. The setting? Rural Nebraska, circa 2016. Though the existence of aliens is an accepted fact, these country folk are keen to go about their lives with nary a concern for other planets that they’ll never see. The local sheriff (Kerry McDonald) can’t get rid of these two space jocks fast enough once they arrive in town, but the duo is here to investigate a murder at a high school football game with potential alien connections.
At its most cynical, the convenience of placing two superheroes in sprawling Nowheresville, U.S.A. allows Lanterns to masquerade as grown-up TV whilst working overtime to rebrand the superheroes as cool again. You don’t need to convince comic fans about that—bring up N. K. Jemisin’s Far Sector in conversation for instant nerd street cred—but for regular people, their chief association may still be the 2011 bomb starring Ryan Reynolds.
Optimistically, taking a Frankenstein approach to a Green Lantern show by sourcing surface elements from True Detective, Yellowstone, Ozark, Mare of Easttown, and even Friday Night Lights(seeing Chandler on the bleachers again is a strong enough image to conjure old feelings) is both an artistic gamble and a cheat code. We’re not just watching a Trojan horse encased in an emerald shell, designed to make the latest drop from James Gunn’s precarious stewardship of DC Studios feel worthwhile. Lanterns is a superhero show as watchable as anything that airs in its coveted Sunday night HBO time slot.
For the most part, Lanterns is worthwhile as well. Episode 1, simply and aptly titled “Pilot”—serendipitous when you consider Jordan’s civilian identity—shines despite its overly long runtime. It’s due in large part to the how Chandler and Pierre’s mismatched pair zaps new life into a familiar buddy setup. Sure, it’s basically just Lethal Weapon or 48 Hrs.or Men in Black.But it’s hard to argue against Chandler grunting out lines with DCU vocabulary like “Guardians of the Universe” or “Sector 2814” with a textured Texas twang.
There’s also Pierre, who turned heads as the lead of Netflix’s Rebel Ridge. His performance as a plain-spoken, hard-hitting soldier made him a popular fancast for John Stewart—historically DC’s first Black American superhero. Lanterns manifests every fan’s wish with aplomb by affording Pierre the adequate space, focus, and juicy material to flex his stuff and to make his John Stewart singularly his own.
Together, the leading men have swagger and a sense of humor—and not in the corny way Marvel movies ground their comic book zaniness in insincerity. (Which is good!) That kind of dull superhero nonsense wouldn’t work in what Lanterns sets up.
The first episode—which runs a hefty 56 minutes—is anchored by a murder in Nebraska. A mass shooting of unidentified civilians leaves a small town shaken and puts the Lanterns in spitting distance of a local rich asshole with anti-alien rhetoric. His name is William (Garrett Dillahunt), and he happens to be related by marriage to Kelly Macdonald’s sheriff, Kerry. (It’s a small town.) Case in point: John gets real friendly one night with a woman who turns out to be Williams’s wife, Zoe (Poorna Jagannathan). That potential love triangle is sure to be a point of contention in the Lanterns’ ongoing investigation.
Despite its length, Lanterns’ first episode doesn’t wade too deep into its background, alien or otherwise. Instead, it puts a premium on ensuring the HBO crowd knows what makes a Green Lantern a Green Lantern—without outright dropping a five-minute “Green Lantern’s Powers Explained” exposition dump. It effectively warns anyone to get off now should its whiffs of magic superhero antics trigger genre allergies. This is where Lanterns’ borrowed elements begin working against it.
As if so desperate not to repel you or your dad (who fell asleep to Superman last summer), Lanterns’ cosplay of other, better TV casts it as an imitator rather than a uniquely original adventure. The Green Lantern is inherently one of the more “out there” heroes in the Justice League, so it’s frustrating how much Lanternsis too scared to bet on itself. We’re ostensibly watching cops on a contentious journey of mentorship and resentment. But unlike True Detective’s Rust and Cohle, Jordan and Stewart are incapable of registering the horrifying magnificence of the world surrounding them. It’s wrong to say this about anything involving Green Lantern, but the premiere’s lack of imagination holds the episode back.
Thankfully, Chandler and Pierre are still aces, and their corrosive relationship is what will hopefully beckon audiences back to Lanterns next week. Certainly, the circumstances behind the episode’s shocking final image—Hal Jordan frozen dead on the same football bleachers just 10 years later—is enough to make the show appointment viewing. I’m just not sure what kind of TV show we’ll be watching by the finale.
