‘Lanterns’ series review: Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre overcome the fears of greening out

In slickest HBO, of grittiest sight, ‘Lanterns’ chases ‘Watchmen’ and misses by a bite; if the writing struggles to make eight episodes feel tight, Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre still make the wrongs feel right

Published - October 06, 2026 07:49 pm IST

A still from ‘Lanterns’ | Photo Credit: HBO Max

How exactly do you make the Green Lantern gritty? Anyone who has endured Martin Campbell’s campy catastrophe from 2011 knows how ludicrous that question sounds, with an earnest Ryan Reynolds rollicking through that neon-green CGI fever dream he would later spend years brazenly lampooning from the safer perch of his wisecracking antihero at Marvel. This is, after all, a character whose job description involves a magic ring, an intergalactic police force and a battery that runs on willpower, so HBO’s decision to give him the prestige-procedural treatment by transplanting all that cosmic hokum into a True Detective-adjacent rural Americana did initially feel like another miserable indignity to inflict on this notoriously inadaptable DC superhero.

Created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof and comic-book writer Tom King, with Mundy as showrunner and James Gunn and Peter Safran among its executive producers, Lanterns is clearly made by people coming at the material from very different directions. You can feel that tug throughout its eight episodes, which keep bouncing between small-town crime drama and character-heavy television, occasionally punctuated by bursts of IP mythology. Fortunately, Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre are so damn good together that they make the whole thing feel considerably more coherent than it actually is, giving the series a human core without sanding away the ridiculousness of being a Green Lantern.

Lanterns is essentially about two very different men trying, with varying degrees of spite, to work out what the hell they are doing with each other. The pilot begins in 1996, when a young John Stewart watches Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) on television, already established as one of the intergalactic law-enforcers chosen by the Guardians of the Universe to protect different sectors of space. Twenty years later, John (Aaron Pierre) is himself being trained as a Lantern under Hal, who has been tasked with preparing him as his eventual replacement. Their assignment takes them to Rushville, Nebraska, after four people are found dead at a high school football field, all apparently victims of a shooting but with something sus afoot. Hal suspects the victims are aliens, which makes the case his jurisdiction, while Rushville sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) couldn’t care less about the space police getting involved and just wants to figure out who has murdered people in her town.

The investigation leads Hal and John to a mysterious local man who reveals himself to be an alien and warns that a war is coming. When the accused detonates himself in police custody, Hal barely manages to contain the blast with his ring, confirming that the Rushville killings are connected to something far larger than a small-town murder case. The pilot concludes by jumping forward another decade. In 2026, John returns to Rushville and meets Kerry at the same football field where the investigation began, only to discover Hal sitting dead in the snow, apparently shot in the head. His Green Lantern ring is missing. The rest of the season is an anti-buddy-cop drama, with Hal and John forced to investigate the fine denizens of Rushville while trying to solve this extraterrestrial mystery, slowly leading upto Hal’s death.

Chandler’s Hal Jordan is a deeply funny bastard. As Earth’s first Green Lantern, he has inflated intergalactic credentials and enough accumulated heroism to wallpaper a moderately sized ego, yet he carries himself with the irritated resignation of accidentally becoming important at work. The clean-cut test-pilot hero of older Green Lantern stories tends to treat Hal’s quintessential fearlessness as proof of character, but here it has curdled into something less flattering. He takes risks because caution requires him to imagine a future in which he might have to deal with the consequences, and Hal has become remarkably bad at imagining one. Chandler plays the arrogance splendidly, never once dulling the uglier bits to make him more conventionally charming. This Hal is petty, smug, obnoxious, childish, intermittently pathetic and an absolute pain in the arse. But despite being so thoroughly pleased with himself, Chandler subtly gestures that the incessant wisecracking masks an existential panic about becoming obsolete.