The Best New Superhero Show Proves That Less Is Always More

• Lanterns, a new superhero show featuring Hal Jordan and John Stewart, has been a critical and commercial success due to its character-driven approach and minimal use of special effects.
• The show’s focus on the personalities and relationships of the space cop protagonists has resonated with audiences, leading to high ratings and positive reviews.
• By eschewing traditional superhero genre tropes and embracing a more grounded, police procedural format, Lanterns has distinguished itself as a unique and engaging addition to the DCU.

If you like underdogs, it’s hard not to root for the DCU. After all, this is Warner Bros.’s second attempt to compete with the insanely popular MCU after the embarrassing collapse (some would say prolapse) that was the DCEU. Obviously, it’s good for superhero fans to have two different franchises cranking out great films and TV shows; it gives us more to enjoy (sweet, sweet consumption!), and it challenges two different studios to do their very best. For all these reasons and more, I was overjoyed when James Gunn’s Superman provided a successful and colorfully quirky alternative to the overly realistic, overly saturated Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Unfortunately, that film was followed by Supergirl, a critical and commercial dud weighed down by the Kryptonite of bad writing and dubious directorial choices. That made me nervous; was Superman just a fluke, and was the DCU doomed, just like the DCEU before it? Fortunately, my fears were eased by Lanterns, the space cop procedural featuring Hal Jordan and John Stewart. The show is almost universally beloved, but why does Lanterns soar while Supergirl sinks? Simple: the show has embraced a minimalist, less-is-more approach that forces audiences to engage with its characters as humans and not superheroes.

Minimum Effects

As I said, Lanterns is almost universally beloved. On Rotten Tomatoes, the show has a 924 percent from critics. The relatively high fan rating was a pleasant surprise, as it can be notoriously difficult to get a comic book show right. After all, fans often want movies or shows to completely replicate the printed page without making any major changes. Nonetheless, those fans, like the critics, really dug Lanterns, a show that has replaced the high-flying sci-fi adventures of the comics with a grounded story with few special effects. Early on, for example, the fanciest thing the Power Ring does is make Hal hover off the ground.

At first, this seemed like a discrepancy. Why the heck would comic fans love Lanterns, a show that is so completely different from the comics that inspired it? That’s when it hit me: the relative lack of special effects is a feature, not a bug. If the show tried to adapt some crazy comic story like, say, the Sinestro War, audiences would hate it. The effects would look subpar compared to James Gunn’s Superman, and the characters would get lost in the weeds of a generic sci-fi plot. At the end of the day, this would have made Lanterns another poor CGI crapfest that would get canceled before the end of the first season.

Maximum Impact

Wisely, however, the Power Ring and all its fantastic cosmic powers take a backseat to the men who use it. Lanterns is a superhero sendup of True Detective, and as such, it focuses primarily on a duo of quirky space cops as they try to solve a case that just keeps getting weirder. Accordingly, the show lingers on several familiar genre beats: the twitchy local residents, the sexy local sheriff, the messy romantic entanglements. These are, of course, hallmarks of a prestige police procedural and not a superhero TV show. However, audiences clearly loved this approach, as Lanterns was the number one DC premiere and number three HBO premiere in broadcast history.

The show’s success proves something paradoxical: the best superhero shows and movies avoid most of the trappings of that specific genre. The Dark Knight succeeded because it wasn’t trying to be a Batman movie; instead, it was a noir-flavored crime thriller that happened to have Batman characters. Similarly, Captain America: The Winter Soldier wasn’t trying to be a Marvel movie; instead, it was a political thriller that happened to have Marvel characters. Now, Lanterns isn’t trying to be what we all expected a Green Lantern show to be. Instead, it’s a buddy cop, hard-R police procedural that just happens to have Hal Jordan and John Stewart in it.

That is, of course, a good thing. Audiences will never fall in love with the tights-and-flights of traditional superhero shows if they don’t first fall in love with the superheroes. Lanterns is doing a perfect job of letting us know who Hal Jordan and John Stewart are, including their personalities (Hal is wise-but-grumpy; John is stoic-but-passionate) and their different approaches to solving crime. Because of this, occasional special effects and sci-fi craziness are just the cherry on top of a great TV show. And the character-centric Lanterns has taught its audience the same thing that Hal is teaching John: the Power Rings are nothing without the fearless men wielding them.