Lanterns Is a Mess, But at Least It’s Not Dull

Lanterns, HBO’s new series about DC comics superhero the Green Lantern, is full of uneasy negotiations. Some of them are deliberate, the surface text of this adaptation: Its two lead characters, Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), are in an awkward mentorship dance, with the former stuck training the latter as a backup Green Lantern. Jordan doesn’t want a partner, and Stewart doesn’t respect Jordan. Jordan is a slapdash, instinct-driven smart-ass; Stewart is hyperserious and responsible to a fault. They sidle around each other, trying to stay cordial and usually failing.

If Lanterns provided a steady surrounding frame for these two superhero figures, the tension between Jordan and Stewart would feel the way it’s probably intended to feel: like a buddy-cop dynamic, with two strong personalities struggling to find the middle ground between them. But especially in the early episodes, Lanterns itself seems unmoored, with one foot in the comic-book superhero world and another in the world of grim prestige drama. It’s as if Jordan and Stewart are yanking the show back and forth between them, with Jordan dragging it over into wry wisecracks and big green-glowy spectacle and Stewart pulling it into the land of traumatic childhood flashbacks and high-minded considerations about the burden of expectation. As the series develops, it settles a bit, particularly toward the later episodes when it seems more fully committed to a particular track. But it is nevertheless haunted throughout by the sense that it could flip at any moment and that none of the characters are quite sure where their feet are underneath them. How political should this show be? How goofy? How grimly realist? Lanterns keeps providing answers, but those answers keep changing.

In part, the show’s scattered sense of identity is due to its constant jumping through multiple story lines. The series begins in one place and then jumps to another, but it also spends a significant amount of energy on a third, and although each of them interlock, they give Lanterns the sense that it is spiraling inward rather than moving ahead. The frame narrative begins in Rushville, Kansas, and involves the discovery of a frozen corpse by a small-town sheriff named Kerry (played by Kelly Macdonald in full, glorious Fargo mode). The identity of that corpse and the nature of all these story lines have been embargoed, which itself is a frustrating element of Lanterns as a series — it can’t always tell which of its elements are a true surprise and which are simply the premise. As a result, some of its premise feels overladen and obvious, while some of its surprises could probably do with more fanfare.

That early scene offers enough framework to define the problem, though. It is a True Detective scene, which makes sense when one of Lanterns’s three creators is Chris Mundy, whose credits include True Detective and also Ozark and Criminal Minds. The second is Tom King, who has worked extensively in the DC Universe and written Batman and Supergirl comics, among others. And the third is Damon Lindelof, whose influence on Lanterns is palpable every time its imagery and sense of imagination trends toward the pleasantly bizarre, which it does too rarely and mostly in the latter half of the season. That combination of creative parentage mirrors the various thematic preoccupations throughout the series. It is sometimes intensely focused on how the ramifications of superhero actions have damaged this small town in Kansas. It’s sometimes most attentive to the impact of race and growing up with the knowledge of being threatened in your own country, with shades of Lindelof’s Watchmen adaptation poking their way into this Green Lantern story. And occasionally, it is doing some noticeable due diligence on the superhero lore of a character it knows is less culturally familiar than someone like Batman or Spider-Man. Here is the suit. Here’s how the powers work. Here’s the general outline of this character’s deal: He is chosen by galactic overlords to take on this job because he is fearless.

Throughout, Lanterns gestures toward bigger ideas about what precisely fearlessness means as a superhero trait. What does that look like, when it exists in the real world? Is it recklessness? Is it single-minded obsessiveness? Is it strength? Stewart’s Blackness comes into focus as a thematic idea here, especially when Lanterns devotes extensive attention to flashbacks from Stewart’s childhood. His parents (played by Jasmine Cephas-Jones and J. Alphonse Nicholson) attempt to instill an otherworldly fearlessness in him, drumming out all his self-protective instincts and simultaneously removing his humanity. But the series, distracted by the need to also introduce important Lantern characters like Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen), Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), and mysterious baddies the Manhunters, can’t seem to sink into its central characters long enough to give those ideas real depth.

Lanterns’s strengths do help soften its frustrating messiness. It has a stellar roster of actors playing its secondary characters, including Garret Dillahunt as Rushville’s local scion William Macon, Poorna Jagannathan as an influential Rushville resident, and Jason Ritter as a compromised town lawyer. It has, thank God, a sense of humor, which appears in Chandler’s constant wisecracking and in odd flourishes like giving Hal Jordan a pet carnivorous plant named Earl, but it’s most compelling in the show’s approach to characters like Macon. Lanterns would be a better, stronger show if everyone felt free to be as unapologetically weird as Dillahunt is in this role, but a little Dillahunt is certainly better than none.

As the series develops, Lanterns itself does move closer toward a settled identity. By the end of episode seven (the eighth finale episode was not provided to critics), Stewart’s dynamic with Jordan is no longer as precious, and Pierre’s grip on the character has been allowed to unclench a bit as Stewart develops out of his early straitlaced directness. Eventually, Lanterns is confident enough to swerve into a mega-Lindelof-y emotional dreamscape space, and although the metaphorical lines are blunt, that move feels like a welcome new anchor in Lanterns’s tonal direction. This show does not have to be big, broad goofiness or grim True Detective darkness. There are promising notes of instinctual strangeness, and the world gets less rote and predictable. That said, the latter episodes still make sure to work their way around to more childhood flashbacks. Some story shapes are hard to shake.

Lanterns’s best asset, the one that shines through despite its uncertainties and occasional missteps, is also the most important one. It is a mess, but it is not dull. Kyle Chandler’s having a rip-roaring time as sardonic Hal Jordan, and until John Stewart is allowed to loosen up a bit, he carries the series on his shoulders. The multi-armed story lines get tiresome, but most of those sections have enough internal momentum that they don’t fully wear out their welcome. The twists arrive at a reasonable clip, and the season’s larger structure (also embargoed) may have some drawbacks, but it will also keep the audience on its toes. It is a Frankenstein of a story, with many parts that struggle to operate as one unified whole. Lanterns is best when it embraces its odd awkwardness, less beholden to its prior DNA and attempting to become wholly itself.

Lanterns airs weekly beginning Sunday, August 16, at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.