‘Lanterns’ Review: HBO’s Scintillating ‘Green Lantern’ Series Brings DC’s Space Cops Down to Earth
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- HBO's "Lanterns" premieres Sunday, August 16 at 9 p.m. ET, with an eight-episode first season running weekly through the October 4 finale
- Aaron Pierre stars as John Stewart, a military-trained sniper who has waited two months for Hal Jordan to even let him wear the Green Lantern ring
- Kyle Chandler plays Hal Jordan, Earth's veteran Green Lantern, who arrives two weeks late to meet his protégé and proudly hungover — pledging he'll die before giving up the ring
- The central mystery sends the duo to Rushville, Nebraska, where four strangers are dead after a shooting at a high school football game
- Co-creators Chris Mundy, Tom King, and Damon Lindelof structure the series like a "Watchmen"-flavored cop show set in America's heartland, centering systemic racial discrimination alongside comic-book sci-fi
- Kelly Macdonald plays Sheriff Kerry Kerry Kane opposite Jason Ritter, Garret Dillahunt, and Poorna Jagannathan, with the town's wealthy Macon family deploying a private militia against an unnamed threat backed by an NDA-bound "mysterious benefactor"
Why it matters: For HBO, "Lanterns" is a bet that DC's cosmic cop mythos can anchor a prestige TV flagship — staking a multi-season show on a Black protagonist (Aaron Pierre's credentialed John Stewart) measured against an entrenched white mentor whose refusal to step aside is the engine of the story. The series recasts Earth's Green Lantern beat as a generational and racial standoff rather than a cape drama, and reviews calling it "scintillating" and a "bold endeavor" signal HBO may have found a replacement tentpole as its superhero ambitions shift away from the failed Ryan Reynolds film.
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