Lanterns opens the way a prestige crime drama opens: on the aftermath of a shooting in Rushville, a small farm town in Nebraska, the kind of place where nothing is supposed to happen. Two investigators walk the scene. Then one of them, Hal Jordan, a Green Lantern, says the killer was probably not human. That collision is the whole show. HBO's new DC series wants to be a slow, grounded murder mystery and a space-cop franchise at the same time, and the tension between those two is its real subject, as much as any case.
That sounds like a problem, and sometimes it is. It is also the most interesting thing on television about superheroes right now. Lanterns premiered August 16 to a 91 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, and it is less interested in saving the universe than in watching two men who can bend reality get stuck in a case they cannot punch their way out of. The pleasure, and the strain, both live in that mismatch.
Two Masters, One Ring
The pedigree explains the ambition. Lanterns comes from Chris Mundy, who ran Ozark, with Watchmen's Damon Lindelof and the comics writer Tom King. Every review has reached for the same phrase, True Detective with power rings, and it fits. The series cuts between a rookie-era Hal (Kyle Chandler, arrogant and coasting on his badge) breaking in a younger John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), and the same pair years later, worn down and barely speaking. Chandler plays Hal as a magnificent jerk, sure he is the smartest man in any room and usually right. Pierre answers him with a stillness that keeps stealing scenes, and it matters that the show is built around John Stewart, the Lantern screen adaptations have spent decades sidelining. The bench behind them is deep, with Kelly Macdonald in the mix and Nathan Fillion turning up as the hotheaded Lantern Guy Gardner.
But the comparison is where most reviews stop, and it misses the more useful point. This is the first real television series of the rebuilt DC Universe, arriving right after Supergirl, and it is doing two incompatible jobs at once. One is to be a patient, adult murder drama. The other is to be a franchise pilot, seeding oaths, Guardians, alien reconnaissance missions, and villains like Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen). Those jobs pull opposite ways, and across the premiere you can feel the rope. It is the same strain that has defined the DCU under James Gunn: prove the brand can be serious and sell the brand at the same time.
The Alien Did It
The show is best when it lets the grounded half lead. Rushville is shot with the muted, overcast patience of good HBO crime, and the grief in it feels earned. The younger timeline, with Hal still new to the ring, gives the present-day burnout its ache, and you watch a partnership sour in slow motion. Chandler and Pierre do the unglamorous work of two men who dislike each other stuck in the same car for hours, and the writing trusts silence. When Lanterns forgets it is a comic book, it is superb.
The strain shows the moment the answer turns out to be, more or less, that an alien did it. In the premiere the suspect they corner reveals himself as an alien on a reconnaissance mission, and the register lurches. A story that just spent twenty minutes earning your investment in a very human horror asks you to file it under something a power ring can eventually handle. The comic furniture keeps arriving on schedule after that. Cosmic oaths and energy-twin villains all report for duty. Lindelof did a version of this in Watchmen, folding the fantastic into a recognizable America, but there the strangeness served the human wound. Here it too often interrupts it. Critics are split on whether the balance holds, and that split is not a failure of the reviews. It is an honest read of a show still deciding what it is.
The Slow Bet
What makes Lanterns worth staying with is that it seems to know exactly what it is doing. This is the show DC chose to open its television era, and it plays like a deliberate bet. Instead of another weightless CGI brawl of the sort that has sunk recent revivals like the Masters of the Universe reboot, it offers a slow, R-rated, eight-episode character study that trusts you to wait for it. In a genre worn out by spectacle, restraint is the boldest swing on the table.
Whether it pays off depends on the back half, on whether the murder and the mythology finally braid together instead of trading turns. For now Lanterns is a fascinating, frustrating, uneven thing, a superhero show that is at its sharpest when it is a little ashamed to be one. If it ever stops apologizing for the ring and starts using it, it could be the best thing DC has put on a screen in years.