Let’s rewind to 1996. Hal Jordan emerges as Earth’s pioneering Green Lantern, sitting for an exclusive interview on 60 Minutes. Draped in his iconic green attire, Jordan unravels his dual identity to the world. An Air Force test pilot burdened by a tragic past, Jordan redefines himself as humanity’s guardian—a “space cop” charged with the monumental task of shielding not just our planet but an entire quadrant of the galaxy from cosmic menaces. And though he calls himself “a regular person like you,” there’s one stark difference: he knows no fear.
Fast forward to 2006, and Hal Jordan still holds the title of Earth’s first Green Lantern. Although time has made him wiser, he’s retained his laid-back demeanor and sense of duty. As part of his routine, Jordan engages in a rather serious task—backing up his consciousness—a ritualistic procedure he won’t repeat for another decade.
By 2016, John Stewart steps into the limelight as Earth’s second Green Lantern, or at least he would, if Hal Jordan were more eager to pass the torch. Hal, embroiled in his own universe of angst, exhibits traits that range from the bitterly sardonic to the irresponsibly egotistical. His possessiveness over the Green Lantern mantle is blatant and Earth feels too congested for two Lanterns. With John waiting in the wings, Hal drags out his mentorship, reluctant to speed up the inevitable changeover.
Now we leap to 2026. The mantle of Earth’s Green Lantern confidently fits John Stewart. But Hal Jordan, the original torchbearer, meets a chilling end—frozen to death among the stands of a Nebraska high school football field.
In this intriguing mix of heroics and suspense, Chris Mundy (Ozark), Damon Lindelof (Lost), and Tom King—hailing from both DC Comics and the circles of the CIA—pen HBO’s spellbinding Lanterns. On the surface, it unravels a classic whodunit—a mysterious firefight involving human-disguised aliens at that football stadium. But beneath lies a far more captivating enigma: how did Hal Jordan’s journey wind from being an all-American icon in 1986, through his transformation to a divisive figure in 2016, and ultimately to his mysterious demise by 2026?
As a pilot episode (though the word “Pilot” has a double meaning here), there’s a lot of getting-to-know-you getting done here. In addition to everything we learn about Hal’s personality and past (his dad was a test pilot too until he died in a crash, making test pilot an…interesting choice of occupation for his son), we see that John had a military father who was arguably even more intense. From a young age he appears to have been training John to take over as Green Lantern by shooting apples off his head William Tell/William S. Burroughs–style, to train him to have no fear.
Hal does not want to be training this guy, despite their similar backgrounds. He keeps ditching him, sometimes from the driver’s seat of a moving car, forcing him to scramble to use the ring just to stay alive. Arguably, forcing him to fly to Nebraska the hard way while Hal himself takes to the sky with his ring is even crueler.
Hal’s in a hurry because of the message his old ring-stored self delivered to him via John: “There’s hail in Rushville, Nebraska.” This is right near the sight where the dying alien whose Green Lantern ring selected Hal to take over crashed his ship, so Hal’s been monitoring the location for threats ever since. Now there’s been a shooting at a football game, only nobody seems to know or care about the victims, who are all from the visiting side.
Hal immediately runs afoul of the local sheriff, Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald), who insists the GLs have no jurisdiction since there’s no reason to suspect the victims are aliens. But Hal’s been doing this a long time, and his gut feeling pays off: When he’s finally able to interrogate the one “visiting team fan” who didn’t get killed, the guy outs himself as an alien bringing war to our barbaric planet, then blows himself up. Only Hal’s nearly-depleted power ring saves the day.
But in the 24 hours the Lanterns are in town, a lot more than that goes down. Hal gets himself arrested by provoking a bar fight (he plays Melanie’s “Brand New Key” a few too many times on the jukebox) in a vain attempt to be put in a cell next to the suspected alien. John gets picked up by a gorgeous woman (Poorna Jagannathan) for a very hot quickie in his rental car.
At Hal’s arraignment, a clever young lawyer named Billy Macon (Jason Ritter) shows up to represent him. He’s also Sheriff Kerry’s wife…and the son of the very rich local militia leader, William Macon (Garret Dillahunt). A big fan of the Lanterns, Macon Sr. explains that the gunmen roaming his Yellowstone-like ranch are preparing to repel literal alien invaders, as in ETs. He’s hoping for Hal’s help. He’s also married to Zoe, the beautiful woman John slept with, and he knows that it happened somehow.
Whatever’s about to go down, I assume it goes down well enough, because when John arrives back in town to examine Hal’s frozen body ten years later, he and Kerry act like close old friends. Does that mean Hal was outside their circle of trust by this point, more alone now even than he was when Kerry clocked his so-called fearlessness as loneliness ten years earlier?
Now that it’s here, I can see why this Lanterns project wound up on the small screen rather than the big one. It feels very TV, a hodgepodge of popular shows and genres and influences. Like a lot of television over the past decade-plus, from Fargo to Dutton Ranch, it’s set in a conservative environment west of the Mississippi. There’s a harried heroine trying to do the right thing in a brown uniform. The mystery box, the police procedural, the big-sky drama — it’s all here.
But what it reminds me of the most, with its mismatched buddy cops and its time jumps and its conspiratorial mystery involving hidden truths about the world and who runs it, is True Detective. Like that show, Lanterns generates titanic amounts of goodwill just by virtue of its charismatic, attractive leads, Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre, whose insanely piercing eyes they had to cover with contacts to make him look like a normal person and not a Greek god.
They’re matched in this department by Macdonald and, especially in this episode, Jagannathan as Zoe, whose sexual chemistry with Pierre’s John is instantaneous and instantly convincing. (He lights her cigarette with his ring! Oooh-whee!) Dillahunt’s bearded, MAGA-coded anti-alien big-timer commands the screen when he’s on it, too.
To put it into the context of superhero comics, Lanterns is very much a ’00s-style “superheroes-plus” story, the idea back then being that superheroes were unpopular, but other genres were not, so you just mash them together and enjoy the results. The plus in this “superheroes-plus” story is “a True Detective–style unlikely buddy cops in rural America murder mystery.” It’s the kind of slow, down-to-earth thing superhero fans reared on Bendis and Brubaker are likely to enjoy.
Could I have done without the interrogation scene hinging on verbal product placement for Harry Potter, WBD’s transphobia-funding boy-wizard cash cow? Oh, you bet. I also think individual creators deserve credit for these characters and concepts, not “DC Comics,” which is societal construct. In this case, we have Martin Nodell and Bill Finger to thank for the original Green Lantern name and general idea, John Broome and Gil Kane for Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern superhero concept as we currently know it, and Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams for John Stewart. Print their names, and print them some money.
Other than these unfortunate bum notes (seriously, they could have picked any other book or movie in the world, and not crediting the people who made this up for you is embarrassing), Lanterns is a cleverly written show, engagingly acted by people I like watching. I’ll render my final verdict the happy moment I see a giant green boxing glove, but until then, these space cops are still worth a ride-along.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.