HBO’s Lanterns Lights a Path for Superhero Stories

The creative team and star Kyle Chandler talk about HBO’s Lanterns, the latest in the DC Comics superhero franchise.

By Kilian Melloy

The comic book hero — actually, heroes, plural — Green Lantern has a complicated history. The character was originally a vigilante crimefighter named Alan Scott who used a ring with magic powers to fight evildoers. Scott debuted in 1940, but in 1959 the character was reimagined as a test pilot named Hal Jordan, who took possession of alien technology in the form of a power ring capable of projecting force fields in the shape of whatever implement Jordan might imagine — hammers, tongs, tweezers, anything. Having assumed the ring, Jordan also took on the role of Green Lantern, a kind of intergalactic police officer. In the comics, Jordan was joined over time by seven other human Green Lanterns, among them Guy Gardner, John Stewart, Jessica Cruz, and Jo Mullein. Gardner’s Green Lantern, played by Firefly star Nathan Fillion, appeared in last year’s Superman feature film, the cornerstone of a rebooted DC Comics cinematic franchise; otherwise, the Green Lanterns have not been part of superhero movies, save for the critically panned 2011 feature starring Ryan Reynolds (who went on to find far greater superhero success as the big screen’s Deadpool).

That’s changed with the premier of HBO’s Lanterns, starring Kyle Chandler as veteran Green Lantern Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre as his trainee, John Stewart. A Green Lantern series on HBO has been a long time in the making: Greg Berlanti was involved at one point, and his idea was to bring in several generations of the ring-wearing space cops, including a queer Green Lantern. The multigenerational element remains intact, but the premiere of the eight-episode first season of Lanterns shows no trace of Berlanti’s LGBTQ+-inclusive vision. Indeed, Stewart screws up — literally — by indulging in an ill-advised hookup with a woman named Zoe (Poorna Jagannathen) on his first night in a small Nebraska town where a mass shooting at a football game has triggered Jordan’s sense for alien mischief. They meet cute, with her chatting him up while Jordan precipitates a bar brawl in order to land himself in jail so he can question a suspected alien agent. (Boardwalk Empire star Kelly MacDonald plays the town’s skeptical sheriff, who is impressed by neither Jordan’s celebrity status nor his power ring.)

The aftermath of Stewart’s hookup turns awkward when Zoe turns out to be married to local militia leader William Macon (Garrett Dillahunt), who shares Jordan’s conviction that aliens are in town and up to no good. The question of what agenda Macon and Zoe are pursuing, and just who their big-money backers might be, becomes one more wrinkle in the situation, which is already freighted with Jordan and Stewart’s mutual disdain; Stewart is no-nonsense, offended by Jordan’s sloppy attitude and on-the-job drunkenness, while Jordan is hardly thrilled with the task of training his own replacement.

“I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-05WmSAmLK4mean, it’s not too hard to figure out that Hal has a competitor here,” Chandler, who recently turned 61, said during a panel discussion just prior to the show’s premiere last month, “and he doesn’t want to admit it, but, you know, he’s getting a little older” — something that, the panelists noted, is beginning to show up in the youth-oriented superhero genre with Nichalos Cage playing a more mature version of Spider-Man in Amazon’s Spider Noir. Chandler added, “when got this, I was like, ‘Oh wow, really? I’m going to be a superhero? Me?’ But [being older] was a great advantage, because there are things with your older years that come to you that you get to, in a project like this, you get to use them…. I mean, there’s a little bit of goodness and some wisdom and some of that.”

Series co-creator Damen Lindelof of Lost fame admitted that he was mulling midlife himself when he became part of the project. “I’m now at a point in my career where I’m in my 50s and I’m still showrunning,” Lindelof said, “but starting to feel like it’s time for me to give up the ring, but I don’t want to let it go. And, that idea really captivated me.” Also captivating was the idea of working with Lanterns co-creator and showrunner Chris Mundy. “I was just a huge fan of Ozark,” a previous series of Mundy’s that starred Jason Bateman and Laura Linney. “And I had heard that he had just done True Detective: Night Country, which I hadn’t seen yet.” Mundy’s ability to blend high-concept stories with real-world sensibilities also appealed to him. “Why should I care about space cops?” Lindelof mused, before answering the question himself: Namely, Jordan and Stewart are “human beings first before they even put on the rings.”

Mundy followed up on that thought, articulating that “these are people and it’s a real job…. There’s a point in their job where [it’s] like, ‘Oh, is it time for me to step aside for the next people?’ …[I]f we’re going to buy that people are a superhero sort of for a living, I don’t know who pays you, but these things are real.”

Real-feeling, too, are the characters, who very quickly give a sense of being fully rounded. “I feel very seen when I read John,” the London-born Pierre said. “John to me is somebody who is a raging sea internally. You know, externally he’s a gentleman, he’s precise, he’s accurate, he’s intentional, he’s clean. But internally, he’s a raging sea, he’s a tornado, he’s a volcano, and I give the analogy of, you know, going to someone’s house and it’s spotless, but you find that one room that they shoved everything in, and it’s hell in there.”

Such restraint is something of a hallmark of the series, which benefits from the smart choice of initially downplaying the manifestations created by the Lanterns’ power rings. Mundy explained the strategy, saying, “the first time there’s a construct used, it’s Hal doing a 20-dollar bill to play a song over and over again.… And then, John is lighting a cigarette with it, and then it’s a bottle opener, ’cause we’re just, like, ‘Oh, this is part of our world.’” That said, “by the end of the episode, there’s a bigger construct,” Munday added, “And then by the next episode, there’s more. It’s just like, are you accepting this reality? Are you accepting these people as real people with this weird job of being a space cop, but they also still have to wake up as themselves?”

Lindelof elaborated, explaining that “it’s all about the characters and their humanity, and if you start and [if] you’re having conversations about rings and planets and aliens and all that stuff, you’re in the wrong territory. The territory is basically like, ‘Who are these guys? Where do they come from?’ You know, ‘What does Hal want? What does John want?’ And once we sort of innately understood through the process of talking to each other and then into our wider room that undergirding the tropes of a buddy cop story was this much more interesting idea of kind of a love story, and a mutual respect story, and one guy needing another guy to kind of move through that story.”

Larger themes are afoot as well, Jagannathan noted, saying that the series is “a whodunit, right? It’s a bit of a murder mystery, but actually it’s a very profound dissertation on power.” That extends to the relationship between Zoe and William Macon. “It becomes very clear pretty early on that both of us… want to maintain the town’s power and we become a foil for the Green Lanterns in a certain way,” the Deli Boys and Little Big Lies veteran added. “So, the exploration of this character is, first of all, she sees John and there’s an instant affinity. We’re probably the two people of color in a very, very white town, right? So, there’s an instant connection, instant curiosity that happens. But, you know, as it unfolds, it’s really exploring different power dynamics of different people, and it’s very mysterious, indeed.”

Dillahunt jumped in with his own take on Zoe and Macon, declaring, “I think there’s a lot of stereotypes that could have been applied, certainly to my character, and he seems open to all kinds of things that you wouldn’t suspect he would be…. And I love that their relationship, that it seems kind of free and easy.”

Free and easy, perhaps, but also, like the rest of the show, relatable. King addressed the show’s grounded feel, noting that “we can show why the powers are important because we build the scale of the real so they explode like the dragons do in Game of Thrones instead of just being lost among the chaos,” and explaining that this approached led to “the idea of putting it in Nebraska, a place where they would really stand out.” By starting small, showing restraint, and openly acknowledging the potential absurdities of the ring’s power, the show’s producers help immunize the series from the missteps of the 2011 feature film.

That grounding strategy extends to tone. Mundy noted how the creative team drew on unexpected influences. “We talked about Midnight Run, where the banter is always funny and yet the stakes are always real.” King added that the show channels the spirit of comic book pioneer Neal Adams, who famously refused to accept the industry as given. “[F]or people who don’t know Neal, he’s one of the GOAT artists in comics, but, besides that, he was a true rebel…. He turned the turned the tables over and said, ‘We’re looking at this industry all wrong, let’s do it different.’ And that’s the spirit he brought when he created John Stewart, and from that first issue [of the comics that introduced Stewart] when he goes in there and Hal’s like, ‘You got to wear a mask’…. John just won’t take the world the way it’s given to him the same way Neal wouldn’t take the world the way it’s given to him, and he’s throwing over tables, saying, ‘I’m not wearing a mask, I know who I am. I’m something different than you, and I might be something better than you.’”

Fittingly, for a property with such iconoclastic DNA, the series focuses on its own characters and storyline, at least in the first episode. Guy Gardner is slated to show up later in the season (played, once more, by Nathan Fillion), and years will pass as the episodes go by, but Lanterns is well-situated to remain firmly rooted in its own creative choices no matter how it eventually dovetails with the wider reboot of the DC cinematic universe.

If decades of superhero films and TV series have proven anything, it’s the value of keeping things real — or, at least, fairly real-adjacent. That ethos informs Lanterns in tone, pacing, characterization, and overall execution, keeping the show effective and surprising.

As for what comes next, Lindelof offered a promise: The show tells “a complete story… but we want the audience to be really hungry for more when it ends.” Viewers don’t need to watch all eight episodes of Season One to build up to that hunger for more; watch the premiere, and you’ll want to see what happens next.

“Lanterns” streams on HBO.