Lanterns: Super Yes, But Atypical: The HBO Series Doesn't Just Target Green Lantern Fans

Over nine million viewers worldwide watched the pilot episode of Lanterns in the first three days after its launch: it's one of the most flattering results of the year for the HBO platform, but above all, one of the best small-screen debuts ever recorded for a superhero series, achieved at a time when the public is giving at least mixed signals about the genre. Instead, Lanterns started with great solidity, especially in the US market (70% of the total data), approaching the public results of Marvel's most anticipated series launched by Disney+.

In addition to the high-caliber cast and the signature of a showrunner highly appreciated in the comics field like Damon Lindelof, and the allure of the Green Lantern universe (which, however, has never had an easy life in cinema), what makes the difference is the series' hybrid and atypical approach, which with its western undertones and its detective approach aims to conquer a much wider audience than just comic book readers. So much so that the label of a "pure" superhero series really doesn't fit Lanterns, unlike titles like The Boys or Daredevil.

Lanterns is an investigative thriller with "super" characters

Lanterns was conceived as an investigative thriller with sci-fi premises, as in the comic, but rendered with the tones of a detective story: its two protagonists Hal Jordan and John Stewart are indeed two space cops, but they are busy solving a mystery on Earth, more precisely in Nebraska. The explicit and declared reference is to a genre-defining series like True Detective.

This was also the reason why Damon Lindelof, co-creator of Lost and author of Watchmen, decided to get involved in the project: "I had heard that Tom King was working on this Green Lantern series, which was described as a kind of superheroic True Detective. I immediately liked the idea of space cops, the possibility of focusing on the men who wear the rings.

Chris Mundy, showrunner of Lanterns and former executive producer of True Detective: Night Country, explains how the writers drew inspiration from many genre classics: "We talked a lot about No Country for Old Men, especially for the geographical setting and for that sense of increasing pressure on the characters. Incidentally, two future cast members of Lanterns, Kelly Macdonald and Garret Dillahunt, starred in that Coen brothers film." To find the chemistry between Hal and John, they looked to Midnight Run: "We wanted the same bond that exists between Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin, with two people traveling the same road but one of them being escorted as a prisoner. The stakes always remain real, even if they exchange jokes with each other. We were constantly trying to figure out how far we could push the fun part without losing the substance along the way."

Completing this mixture is finally the classic western. Lindelof specifically cited "archetypal ideas, almost John Wayne-esque, and a certain model of masculinity inherited by the two protagonists from their elders. John and Hal have an almost brotherly relationship, or at least that's the impression they give as they develop this very complicated relationship with their fathers precisely through their bond."

Lanterns allows supers to age

Another atypical element of the series is the age of one of its two protagonists: Hal Jordan has the face of sixty-year-old Kyle Chandler, in the role of a character grappling with what will come after him.

For Chandler, this element made him accept the role: "When I got the part, I thought it was crazy to be a superhero at my age. It was an advantage, though, because there are things that come with age that can be used in a project like this. It's like playing a married man when you're twenty: you can't know certain things about marriage that only come after years, that you discover little by little." Age also allows for unexpected comedic developments: "There's a lot of humor in aging that this series captures perfectly. I think it's really important to show the lives of older people in our culture, which is always so focused on young people. There's something good, even wise, in doing that."

For Mundy, portraying a sixty-year-old Hal also means above all treating the Green Lantern assignment as a real job, with all that entails: "If we're going to take seriously the idea that these are people and that this is a real job, there has to be someone who experiences that moment in their profession where they wonder if it's time to step aside, to make way for those who will come after."

This is precisely the question that ends up defining the relationship between Hal and the younger John Stewart, which Lindelof felt very close to: "I've reached fifty and I'm still a showrunner, but I'm starting to feel that maybe it's time to hand over the ring of the role, so to speak. And yet I don't want to let it go. Behind the passing of a ring capable of conferring cosmic powers from hand to hand is a very earthly question: when is it time to leave your place to someone else?"

Green Lanterns in Nebraska

The choice to set Lanterns in Nebraska is not limited to giving the series its rural thriller atmosphere. For Tom King, it also serves to escape a sense of ordinariness after 25 years of pop products derived from comics: "Having passed almost twenty-five years since superheroes became part of pop culture, their stories of powers and responsibilities risk becoming noise on top of other noise, of disappearing. There is no longer a scale that allows one to understand the greatness of what you are watching by comparing it to something else."

To better explain what he means, King brings up Lawrence of Arabia: "Just looking at the desert means nothing, but when you see Omar Sharif on that single camel crossing it, suddenly that desert becomes vast, enormous, incredible." Lanterns tries to apply the same principle to superpowers, immersing them in a concrete and "small" reality, where the fantastic element erupts: "We wrote a series where the scale of the real is built first, and only then do the powers explode, a bit like what happens with the dragons in Game of Thrones. Nebraska is a place where the fantastic element, when it arrives, stands out."

King's grandmother, incidentally, came from that small Nebraska town, and for a child raised in Los Angeles, her stories were truly "fantasy": "She constantly told me stories about this town, a place where you went to school on horseback, there were three students in class, and everyone really knew each other. For me, that was an alien planet. That childhood impression came in handy when I started working on Lanterns. Also, my grandmother was a wonderful person: I wanted to put some of her way of being into the series and I tried to infuse it into Rushville."