HBO has premiered Lanterns, a new series set in the DC Comics universe that recasts its Green Lantern superheroes as small-town detectives, drawing early comparisons to HBO's own True Detective.
The eight-episode series follows John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), a young U.S. Marine training for a post as a galactic Green Lantern, under the mentorship of the established Green Lantern Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), who is rarely seen without a beer. Hal shows little interest in training his protege, and both men make no secret of their mutual irritation and fatigue with the arrangement.
A shooting in Rushville
The story turns on a shooting at a football match in Rushville, a small town in Nebraska, that leaves three spectators dead. Hal takes on the investigation, suspecting alien involvement, and clashes with local Sheriff Kerry (Kelly Macdonald) over jurisdiction.
Hal finds an unlikely ally in William Macon (Garret Dillahunt), the sheriff's father-in-law and Rushville's behind-the-scenes power broker, who unexpectedly attaches himself to the superhero as a friend. The investigation drags John and Hal through the town's darkest corners and onto the trail of the Hunters, dangerous synthetic aliens who are indistinguishable from humans. The alien-infiltration plot echoes Marvel's Secret Invasion, released three years earlier, a similarity that has left some viewers seeing the premise as derivative.
Billed as a mix of fantasy, action-adventure, detective thriller and drama, Lanterns was directed by James Hawes, Geeta Vasant Patel and Alik Sakharov, and written by Tom King, Damon Lindelof and Chris Mundy. The cast also includes Nathan Fillion.
DC versus Marvel
The series arrives as part of the DC universe relaunch led by James Gunn, who directed Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy films before crossing over to run DC in its rivalry with its longtime competitor. The two studios currently appear evenly matched: Marvel answered DC's Superman at the box office with its recent blockbuster Spider-Man: New Day, while on streaming, DC's second season of Peacemaker and its series The Penguin are seen as far outpacing Marvel's television output in creative ambition.
The neo-western influence
The new wave of competition has pushed Gunn's DC into the neo-western, currently the most popular genre aimed at male television audiences. Its popularity owes much to Taylor Sheridan, creator of Tulsa King with Sylvester Stallone, Landman with Billy Bob Thornton, and the Yellowstone franchise, and to Nic Pizzolatto, creator of the True Detective franchise. Chris Mundy, one of the show's writers, worked on the fourth season of True Detective, a link that has fueled comparisons between the two shows.
The superhero series borrows the genre's hallmarks: stark realism, toxic masculinity, a fractured timeline, and a Midwestern melancholy standing in for the Southern Gothic mood of its predecessor.
A buddy-cop dynamic
Another forerunner cited is Marvel's 2021 series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which likewise paired a superhero narrative with a buddy-cop detective story. As in that series, Lanterns leans on the relationship between its two leads rather than on plot twists to carry the drama.
Chandler, star of Friday Night Lights, remains the show's main draw, with Pierre, known for The Underground Railroad, and Macdonald, known for Trainspotting and No Country for Old Men, orbiting him. Despite never having played a role such as George W. Bush, the veteran actor carries both the comedy and the drama, leaving the action, in combat and in the bedroom, to his more muscular co-star.
Western's long run on screen
Lanterns has been met with an almost universally positive reception. Its writers, led by Mundy, are seen as having applied a reliable formula, pairing a well-worn plot with a genre that is back in fashion.
The western has run alongside cinema since the medium's earliest days, from The Great Train Robbery through the mid-20th century, when the Wild West frontier reliably guaranteed box-office returns. Italian spaghetti westerns offered the genre's first deconstruction in the 1960s, and it later resurfaced across other eras and settings, including science fiction such as Star Wars, before returning to the present day in the films of the Coen brothers and the Yellowstone universe. The Mandalorian and Logan are among the recent franchises that turned to the western toolkit and became hits.
The genre's pull lies partly in the universal appeal of cowboy stories, and partly in the reassurance that the image of the free-roaming, masculine frontiersman offers audiences living through unsettled times, an image now emulated by politicians, tech moguls and rappers alike, and, increasingly, by superheroes.
