5 HBO Shows That Outshine Lanterns—and What to Watch Next

The early word on “Lanterns” has been encouraging: DC’s latest HBO drama appears to be a genuinely strong entry in the franchise. Looper’s Dominic Griffin described “Lanterns” as the “mystery thriller the DCU needs,” and it arrives at a moment when DC Studios is clearly trying to strengthen its television lineup in the same ecosystem-building spirit that helped define the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Under James Gunn’s leadership, the DCU has been steadily delivering more confident, polished small-screen projects. Like HBO’s “Peacemaker,” “Lanterns” puts the spotlight on a specific corner of DC Comics mythology — though this time, it’s one with a rocky pop culture reputation. Yes, Ryan Reynolds, longtime Green Lantern critic-in-chief, we remember.

As the title suggests, “Lanterns” dives into the Green Lantern Corps, the interstellar force of peacekeepers powered by their iconic rings. The series narrows its focus to two key figures: Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan, a veteran Lantern looking to step away from the Corps, and Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart, the new recruit being trained to take his place. Their partnership begins with a murder investigation, but what first looks like a grounded case soon points toward something much larger — and far more cosmic — than either man expects.

Still, even if “Lanterns” proves to be one of the more promising DCU shows on HBO, it is stepping into a very crowded arena. HBO has spent decades building a reputation for prestige drama, and many of its best original series remain essential viewing, with some still returning for new seasons every year or two. So after sampling “Lanterns” on HBO Max, it’s worth comparing it with these standout HBO dramas — a few of which may be even stronger than DC’s new Green Lantern series.

One of the clearest examples is “The Leftovers,” Damon Lindelof’s haunting adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s 2011 novel. When the series premiered on HBO in 2014, it did not immediately become a mainstream sensation. Its first season introduced viewers to a world shattered by the Sudden Departure, an unexplained event in which 2% of the global population vanished without warning. Justin Theroux starred as Kevin Garvey Jr., a police chief in New Jersey struggling to hold his town and family together; Ann Dowd played Patti Levin, the chilling leader of the Guilty Remnant; and Carrie Coon delivered a devastating performance as Nora Durst, a woman grieving the loss of her husband and children. Nora’s tragedy is especially brutal because she is the only member of her family who remains. Perrotta’s book is powerful in its own right, but the first season of the HBO version sometimes struggles to fully translate that material into television.

So why rank “The Leftovers” above “Lanterns”? Because after its initial season, Lindelof and his creative team transformed the show into something remarkable. Season 2 broadened the story while staying rooted in Perrotta’s world, moving part of the action to Jarden, Texas — a town where nobody disappeared during the Sudden Departure. That bold shift gave the series new energy, deeper mythology, and an even more emotional core. By its third and final season, “The Leftovers” had become an extraordinary meditation on grief, faith, love, and survival, with Coon and Theroux delivering career-best work as Nora and Kevin moved toward an unforgettable conclusion. Thanks to that daring reinvention, “The Leftovers” is now widely viewed as a modern HBO classic. “Lanterns” may be good, but this is the kind of prestige drama that sets the bar even higher.

“Succession” isn’t just better than “Lanterns” — it sets a bar so impossibly high that it’s actually sort of unfair to compare it to anything. Created by Jesse Armstrong with luminaries like Will Ferrell, Frank Rich, and Adam McKay as executive producers, “Succession,” a modern retelling of William Shakespeare’s tragedy “King Lear,” sets up its series-long conflict in the very first episode: when Waystar Royco CEO Logan Roy (Brian Cox) decides to step down, who will take his throne?

Enter Logan’s squabbling, power-hungry children and their hangers-on. Kendall, the erroneously self-titled “eldest boy” played by Jeremy Strong — the title of eldest technically belongs to the often overlooked Connor Roy (Alan Ruck), half-sibling to the rest of Logan’s kids — sees himself as the natural successor to Logan’s position. Chaos goblin Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin) also wants the job, though it’s never particularly clear if he wants to do the work or simply feels entitled to the power. As for the family’s only daughter Siobhan “Shiv” Roy (Sarah Snook), Shiv is desperate to prove that she’s more than the token girl (or, to use the infantilizing nickname bestowed upon her by her father, “Pinky”) and take power for herself. Let’s not forget the aforementioned hangers-on — specifically, Shiv’s social-climbing and hapless husband Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) and his favorite punching bag, distant Roy cousin Greg Hirsch (Nicholas Braun).

It’s an understatement to say “Succession” is good; frankly, it’s one of the best TV shows ever made, and several of its lead performers won well-deserved Emmys and Golden Globes for their roles — specifically, Cox, Strong, Culkin, Snook, and Macfadyen, all of whom are astonishingly good. “Lanterns” is at an automatic deficit here, to be honest. “Succession” is better than almost any show that goes up against it.

When screenwriter Mike White joined the 37th season of “Survivor,” quite literally nobody could have guessed that his time on the island (during which he became the season’s runner-up, actually) would lead to one of the best HBO originals ever made. Fueled by creativity during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and reflecting on the interpersonal strategies and deceits found in the game of “Survivor,” White created “The White Lotus,” which began airing on HBO in 2021 and set its first season on Maui, the second-largest island in the state of Hawai’i. With luminaries like Connie Britton, Molly Shannon, Jennifer Coolidge, Steve Zahn, Jake Lacy, Natasha Rothwell, and Murray Bartlett and (then) relative newcomers like Sydney Sweeney, Alexandria Daddario, Season 1 of “The White Lotus” sharply interrogates the class divide between the “haves” and “have nots,” focusing on the very concept of wealth.

Season 2 takes place at a different White Lotus location (in this universe, it’s luxury hotel and resort chain found all over the world) in Sicily, bringing Coolidge back as the daffy heiress Tanya McQuoid and introducing new players like Tanya’s beleaguered assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), toxic couple Cameron and Daphne Sullivan (Theo James and Meghann Fahy), three generations of Di Grasso men in grandfather Bert (F. Murray Abraham), adult son Dominic (Michael Imperioli), and son Albie (Adam DiMarco), and the squabbling duo Harper and Ethan Spiller (Aubrey Plaza and Will Sharpe). While Season 2 investigates sex and the power it can confer, Season 3, set in Thailand, is about appropriating “enlightenment,” brings Rothwell back, and features bombshell performances from Carrie Coon, Leslie Bibb, Sam Rockwell, Parker Posey, Jason Isaacs, Walton Goggins, and Aimee Lou Wood, just to name a few. Escape the dreary landscape of “Lanterns” with “The White Lotus.”

Yes, Carrie Coon appears in not one, not two, but three shows on this list of programs better than “Lanterns” — because she’s just that good. In “The Gilded Age” — made by “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes which is, quite obviously, set in New York City’s so-called Gilded Age of the 1880s — stars Coon as Bertha Russell, the imposing and powerful matriarch of the wealthy Russell family who’s married to George Russell (Morgan Spector), a deeply unethical businessman. (One might call him a “robber baron.”) Because the Russells are technically “new money,” they find themselves at odds with some of their friends and neighbors in New York high society, like Agnes van Rhijn (powerhouse Christine Baranski) who believes that only “old money” families should be accepted into said high society. 

With Cynthia Nixon as Agnes’ sister Ada Forte, Taissa Farmiga and Harry Richardson as George and Bertha’s children Gladys and Larry, and a whole host of Broadway luminaries who appear in semi-regular and recurring roles like Kelli O’Hara, Audra McDonald, Donna Murphy, Robert Sean Leonard, Laura Benanti, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and Celia Keenan-Bolger, just to name a few, “The Gilded Age” is a sumptuously gorgeous and compulsively watchable show that’s also stocked full of familiar faces for theater nerds. “Lanterns” is a solid HBO drama, but if you want to watch some of the best actors of the screen and stage duke it out in stunningly elaborate costumes, give “The Gilded Age” a shot.

We know what you’re thinking. After that disastrous ending (and, realistically, less-than-great final two seasons), people didn’t really want to talk or think about “Game of Thrones” anymore, and if you’re not particularly interested in the more dour shows that take place on the fictional continent of Westeros, “House of the Dragon” and its tale of the Targaryen family’s deadly civil war might not appeal to you either. That’s why we’d like to humbly suggest “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” a buddy comedy that (respectfully) blows “Lanterns” out of the water and earned a fantastic review right here at Looper from Matthew Jackson, who called it a welcome direction for the entire Game of Thrones franchise.

Based on a series of novellas by original “A Song of Ice and Fire” author George R.R. Martin called “Tales of Dunk and Egg,” “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” under the steady hand of Martin himself and showrunner Ira Parker, casts Peter Claffey as the enormously tall hedge (or freelance) knight Ser Duncan the Tall and Dexter Sol Ansell as his tiny squire Aegon “Egg” Targaryen. The comically mismatched physical pair end up teaming up when Duncan, or “Dunk,” reluctantly agrees to train Egg as his squire, having no idea that the little bald boy is a member of the royal and ancient Targaryen line; together, they deal with tourneys, palace intrigue, allies like Daniel Ings’s hilarious Ser Lyonel Baratheon, and enemies like Egg’s awful brother Aerion “Brightflame” Targaryen (“Backrooms” standout Finn Bennett). Sure, “Lanterns” is a good show about an unlikely pair becoming friends, but are is one guy extremely tall and is the other guy extremely short? No. We think not.

“Lanterns” is streaming on HBO Max.