With all the superhero slop that has hit streamers over the past half-decade, it’s been a long time since we were excited for a comic-book show. But Lanterns, the next TV series to launch from James Gunn and Peter Safran’s rebooted DC Universe, is looking increasingly like a strong antidote to our small-screen superhero antipathy. It has a stacked creative team, led by Lost and Watchmen maestro Damon Lindelof—and a vibe that has drawn comparisons to the first season of True Detective. Early trailers have looked pretty damn good.
Hitting HBO Max in mid-August, Lanterns will take DC’s fan-favorite Green Lanterns—the cops of the cosmos, essentially, whose super-charged super-rings give them the power to conjure green-tinted shields, weapons, and anything they can really imagine, out of nothingness—and bring them to Earth, for a grounded, gritty detective mystery that seems tonally in line with the aforementioned prestige masterwork. It’s another bold genre swing amid Gunn and Safran’s quest to revitalize DC Studios across media: with Superman, they won acclaim for revitalizing classic Golden Age comic-book style, but here, the bet seems to be more on the darker, character-led storytelling that you’d typically associate with a big HBO show.
The series primarily focuses on two Lanterns, occupying the age-old cop show archetypes of the grizzled veteran and the maverick rookie: Kyle Chandler plays the former, Hal Jordan, while Rebel Ridge breakout Aaron Pierre comes in as the latter, John Stewart. They’re arguably the two most popular figures of the Green Lantern comics among the DC faithful, and here look to share the kind of fractious mentor-mentee dynamic that has been a staple of detective TV forever. “I’ve been doing this since you were a baby,” Jordan tells Stewart in the second official teaser. “And the only way you’re gonna get this ring is over my dead fucking body.”
“We wanted to tell an on-the-ground story, and that has a couple of different mysteries inside of it,” co-creator Chris Mundy told Entertainment Weekly in a series preview published last month. “We wanna use everything that’s great about the mythology of the Green Lanterns, but at the same time, we wanted it to feel like an upscale mystery, a very emotionally tangible story about these people that are in it.” This ambition is very prestige-coded, but Mundy’s co-creator Lindelof has form with Watchmen—a genuinely excellent series that used Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel as a Trojan Horse for an exploration of white supremacy and historical American racism.
As to the actual plot, the eight-episode series will be split across two timelines. The first in 2016, in remote Rushville, Nebraska, wherein a shooting occurs that Chandler’s Jordan thinks could be alien in origin, with the rest of the show taking place in 2026, when “something else” happens, as Mundy teased to EW. Nathan Fillion will also reprise his Superman role as Guy Gardner, another member of the Lantern Corps; Ulrich Thomsen plays Sinestro, a rogue Lantern who was once Jordan’s mentor, and has traditionally been a villain in the source material. It’s yet to be seen whether he will be filling that role in the series. Sounds like a lot to be excited for once it arrives on August 16—and hell, for a superhero TV show to excite us in 2026, they’ve got to be doing something right.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.