Four episodes into Lanterns, HBO’s eight-episode Green Lantern series, the show has already pulled off something no other DCU project has: it disappears completely into its own story. There is no universe-building homework, no winking at the next release, no sense that anyone involved is checking a box. It is a murder mystery in a dying Nebraska town that happens to star two members of an intergalactic police force, and it is confident enough in that premise to never apologize for it.
It is also, arguably, the best thing DC Studios has released under James Gunn and Peter Safran.
Not the best DCU television, though it is that too. The best DCU project, period. One of the episodes alone being the strongest single hour the DCU has produced, and it earns that title by doing something none of the films or shows before it have attempted.
Lanterns follows John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) training under veteran Lantern Hal Jordan (Kyle
Chandler) as the two investigate a murder in Rushville, Nebraska, that they believe is connected to extraterrestrial activity. Sheriff Kerry (Kelly Macdonald), the local law who gets pulled into the case, which is complicated by the fact that it runs straight through her own family, the Macons, who are clearly holding onto something.
Worth flagging for anyone going in on the marketing: the season splits itself between 2016 and 2026, but across the four episodes provided for review, only a single scene takes place in 2026. For now this is almost entirely a 2016 story. With Guy Gardner still to appear and the 2026 thread barely opened, the back half clearly has a reason for the structure. We just haven’t been shown it yet.
There was a lot of panic after Supergirl, which, whatever your personal read on the film, did not land with critics, at the box office, or with general audiences. That set off another round of questions about whether the DCU was already in trouble. Lanterns is the answer, and not because it papers over anything. It is the clearest evidence yet that Gunn’s stated approach, letting each creative team make the version of the story they actually want to make, produces something when the right people are in the room.
The show wears its HBO address well. Sunday nights, eight episodes, the True Detective DNA showing in every frame of the Rushville material. It is being treated like prestige drama, but more importantly, it plays like prestige drama, which is a different and much harder thing. It stays locked on its mystery, and it spends real time with people who have no rings and no stake in the Corps.
Kerry is the reason the whole thing holds together. She makes this world legible, a place where people have simply gotten used to an intergalactic peacekeeping organization operating overhead, the way you get used to weather. She is, so far, the heart of the series. Stewart is entirely task-focused, aimed at becoming the next Green Lantern because it is the only thing he has ever trained for. Jordan is straight up an asshole with almost no regard for anyone but himself, though the show is careful to demonstrate why the ring picked him: his calls come from experience and instinct, and his gut does not miss. Behind the bravado, as Kerry points out, Hal is lonely.
The series never explains where that seclusion comes from, but it drops enough to suggest the Guardians have something to do with it. Hal was mentored by Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen), and there is a quiet unease around the idea that some of Sinestro stayed with him. Despite these two characters being human, they almost feel alien, with Kerry being the most human character in this show and the most relatable.
Both leads are excellent, and that deserves saying plainly. Chandler drew real backlash online when the casting was announced, and he answers it inside of one episode. His Hal Jordan has an effortless cool and enough charisma to charm anyone in the room, the seasoned kind that makes it immediately obvious how this man has gotten away with being insufferable for as long as he has. Pierre plays Stewart calculated and controlled and commands every scene he is in without ever raising his voice. He is the more layered of the two, a man who has trained his entire life for a job he has genuinely earned, and the show keeps quietly asking whether earning it and being ready for it are the same thing. The way Episode 1 ends puts that question directly in front of you.
That dynamic between them is genuinely funny to watch. Jordan does not want a protégé and does not take the training seriously. Stewart takes it more seriously than anything in his life. Over these four episodes it curdles into something more interesting, particularly in a vulnerable moment with Sinestro. When Jordan and Stewart first meet, Jordan tells Stewart he will not be getting that ring over his dead body, and the line lands harder later than it does in the moment. Neither man respects the other, and neither is telling the other the truth. Stewart has a plan to make Jordan believe he has his loyalty. It is going to break open.
There’s an episode that features the show’s best hour, and that’s the reason this review opens the way it does. It steps back to John Stewart’s family and, in doing so, retroactively explains the opening moments of the series that initially read as odd and disconnected. There are moments with John Stewart Sr. (Sherman Augustus, played in the flashbacks by J. Alphonse Nicholson) that recontextualise everything we originally thought about Hal Jordan, John Stewart and the Lanterns. It reframes the relationship between the two men entirely.
At the center of the episode is a conversation between one of the Guardians of the Universe and John’s mother, Bernadette Stewart (Nicole Ari Parker, played in the flashbacks by Jasmine Cephas Jones). Her view of the universe is absolute, and fear reads to her as simple failure. Bernadette forces her to look at it differently, walking her through why what happened to her husband was traumatic specifically because he was a Black man, and why an organization that claims to serve everyone equally kept finding reasons not to see him. The Guardian only arrives at the concept once Bernadette puts it in front of her without flinching. It is a remarkable scene, and it flows directly into how the Stewarts decided to raise their son to take the ring anyway: by making sure he would never be afraid of anything.
Green Lantern Issue 76 by Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams © DC Comics
Green Lantern comics have periodically reckoned with this, with Black communities being overlooked by heroes who make time for every species in the sky. The series pulls hard from that thread, most obviously from Green Lantern #76, the O’Neil and Adams issue widely credited as one of the best stories in the Bronze Age, and updates it rather than re-staging it.
The show is also willing to be an adult drama in ways DC has never tried. There is more sex here than you would expect from a comic book property, and the dialogue is period-accurate and often ugly, including racial language used within and around the Stewart family storyline that most superhero productions would sand off entirely. None of it is there for shock. It is there because the show is telling a story about race in America in the 1980s and cannot tell it in a whisper. The result is a comic book series that behaves like a real HBO drama, and a fairly loud signal to the rest of the genre about what mature actually means.
For all of that, this is a Green Lantern show, and it never lets you forget it. The Guardians are here, Sinestro is here inside the first four episodes, and the constructs, the subject of so much preemptive hand-wringing about whether the show would look green enough, are excellent. That worry was always silly, and the premiere alone puts it away.
The off-world material looks great, though you are only in it for seconds at a time, which is either generous editing or good VFX management. My one real quibble is the physical lantern tucked away in a wardrobe, which is an inspired image that still doesn’t quite sit right with me even knowing the Silver Age precedent. As someone who has read only a handful of Green Lantern books, I never once felt like I was watching a show performing the IP rather than living inside it.
The villains are still mostly shadow. The Manhunters preceded the Lanterns and enforced their own version of justice on the galaxy, up to and including the extermination of entire planets, which we learn through Antaan (Paul Ben-Victor), who survived one on his own world. Four episodes in, we have a strong sense of who might be a Manhunter and almost no sense of what they want with Earth. There is also the growing suspicion of a second antagonist hiding behind the first, given how tangled the Macons are getting in all of this. As detective shows go, that is the job. You wait.
So why the best DCU project and not just the best DCU show? Lanterns is the most fully realized thing DC Studios has made. It is the one where the ambition, the craft, and the execution line up without a gap, where the cast is asked to do actual dramatic work, and where the universe-building is a consequence of the story rather than the point of it. It takes the biggest swing and does not miss.
It also finally makes the DCU’s creative thesis visible. Chris Mundy, the showrunner and co-creator here and an executive producer on True Detective: Night Country, has brought that show’s patience with him. Damon Lindelof, who co-created Lost and Watchmen, is in the architecture. Tom King, responsible for some of the most talked-about DC books of the last decade and currently developing a Mister Miracle animated series for the DCU, is in the character work. For the first time, that kind of assembled talent has produced something that feels authored rather than manufactured.
Guy Gardner is still to come, and it will be worth watching how a show this tonally removed
from Superman, and Peacemaker handles him. On the evidence of these four episodes, that is not
a worry either.
