'Lanterns' Review: HBO's Green Lantern Cop Show Delivers
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- HBO's "Lanterns" premieres August 16 at 9 p.m. ET, with eight episodes airing weekly through the October 4 finale, and is intended to run for multiple seasons.
- Aaron Pierre plays John Stewart, a military-trained sniper serving as backup to Kyle Chandler's Hal Jordan, an aging Green Lantern who has served 20 years and refuses to hand over his ring.
- The central case involves four strangers killed at a high school football game in Rushville, Nebraska, with Hal suspecting alien involvement as Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) urges the pair to leave.
- Town power broker William Macon (Garret Dillahunt) runs a private militia funded by a mysterious benefactor bound by an NDA, adding a conspiracy layer to the investigation.
- Co-creators Chris Mundy, Tom King, and Damon Lindelof blend cop-show conventions with DC mythology, centering systemic racial discrimination and the Green Lantern selection question "Are you afraid?" as a thematic throughline.
- The series makes notably little use of the Green Lantern suit — deliberately contradicting the 2011 Ryan Reynolds film — and the review praises Chandler and Pierre's performances as among their finest work.
- The review positions the show as a "bright addition to HBO's expanding mandate," a prestige drama that avoids the empty franchise-capitalization trap even as it name-checks "Harry Potter" corporate expansion.
Why it matters: HBO is staking a multi-season claim in the superhero TV space with a DC property that deliberately subverts blockbuster conventions — minimal use of the suit, a heartland procedural setting, and a racial-generational power dynamic as its core engine. For Pierre, the role marks a major step into franchise stardom alongside an Emmy-winning veteran in Chandler. The August 16 launch tests whether prestige TV viewers will embrace a DC series that borrows more from "True Detective" and "Watchmen" than from traditional superhero spectacle.
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