‘Lanterns’ Season 1 Review: HBO's Green Lantern Show Trades Cosmic Spectacle for Something Stranger and Far More Compelling

Nobody expected a Green Lantern adaptation to open with a grim murder investigation in rural Nebraska, and that alone tells you everything about the risk ‘Lanterns‘ is taking. Fifteen years after a critically maligned feature film turned the character into something of a punchline, HBO’s new series arrives as the first live-action entry in DC Studios’ rebooted cinematic universe, and it approaches Hal Jordan and John Stewart from almost the opposite direction that big-screen attempt did.

Rather than spending its runtime explaining power rings, alien Guardians, and the sprawling mechanics of an intergalactic peacekeeping force, ‘Lanterns’ drops viewers straight into a case. Hal Jordan, played by Kyle Chandler as a disheveled, foul-mouthed veteran cop with decades on the job, hauls his reluctant trainee John Stewart, played with coiled intensity by Aaron Pierre, into the small town of Rushville to investigate a death that quickly reveals itself to be something much bigger and much stranger than either of them anticipated.

What struck me almost immediately is how little the show behaves like a superhero property in the traditional sense. This plays far closer to a moody regional crime drama, all flat highways and suspicious locals, than anything resembling a comic book blockbuster, and that choice pays off more often than it doesn’t. Chris Mundy, whose resume includes ‘Ozark’ and a recent stint on ‘True Detective’, clearly shapes the show’s DNA here, and it shows in every long silence between Hal and John as they circle a conspiracy that the entire town seems determined to bury.

The central relationship carries far more weight than any alien mystery the plot throws at it. Hal is a burnout clinging to relevance, treating his own mortality and eventual replacement with a defensive, wounded pride, while John is a disciplined ex Marine who has done everything by the book and still finds himself perpetually underestimated. Their dynamic works because it never resolves into simple mentorship. It curdles into something closer to resentment, softens into grudging respect, and repeats that cycle in ways that feel genuinely earned rather than manufactured for episodic tension.

Kelly Macdonald rounds out the trio as the local sheriff caught between her own compromised position and a fundamentally decent instinct to do right by the town she’s sworn to protect. She’s married into a family with its own secrets, run by a rancher with a private militia and a mysterious benefactor he’s contractually forbidden from naming, and the show wisely lets that thread simmer rather than rushing toward easy answers.

Where ‘Lanterns’ occasionally stumbles is in how thinly some of its supporting ideas get sketched. The show gestures toward real-world anxieties around race, land, and outsiders with more conviction than follow-through, and a few of its bigger swings, particularly around the rancher’s politics, feel introduced rather than actually interrogated. The visual palette, all muted grays and dust, occasionally undercuts the sense of cosmic wonder that should theoretically come with a story about literal space cops, leaving some of the more fantastical elements looking oddly restrained rather than awe-inspiring.

None of that stops the performances from carrying the show through its rougher patches. Chandler brings a lived-in, sun-weathered charisma to Hal that makes his most self-destructive choices feel tragic rather than simply frustrating, while Pierre does the harder job of making restraint compelling, letting John’s frustration leak out in controlled bursts rather than dramatic outbursts. Their chemistry alone justifies most of the season’s slower stretches, and by the time the mystery starts paying off its groundwork, the show has more than earned its ambition.

I walked away from this season genuinely surprised by how little it resembles what I expected from a Green Lantern show, and mostly grateful for that. It isn’t as tonally daring as Lindelof’s very best work, and it doesn’t always thread its social commentary as tightly as its genre elements deserve, but the central partnership between Chandler and Pierre gives it a gravitational pull that most superhero television simply doesn’t have. This is a confident, patient piece of television that trusts its actors and its atmosphere over cheap spectacle, and it mostly rewards that trust. I’m landing at 8.5 out of 10.