Kyle Chandler’s eyebrows possess an oddly magnetic expressiveness. As the grouchy yet charming Hal Jordan, Earth’s sole Green Lantern, Chandler deploys them to great effect in the season premiere of HBO’s latest superhero drama. Judged solely on eyebrow charisma, the series would earn a perfect score.
However, after viewing only the first episode, the series’ overall quality remains uncertain. Like most critics, the reviewer received seven episodes as screeners but chose to watch only the premiere before writing, mirroring the audience’s Sunday night experience. This approach allows for real-time theorizing and discussion, particularly valuable for a mystery-driven narrative.
This recap and review contains spoilers for the first episode. The reaction to the premiere is heavily influenced by pre-release expectations.
The headline’s comparison to True Detective is intentional. While a final verdict requires more episodes, the first installment of True Detective’s inaugural season immediately established a singular, immersive atmosphere—dark, eerie, and steeped in Southern Gothic surrealism. Its sense of place was palpable, drawing viewers into a fever dream from the outset.
The dynamic between Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle and Woody Harrelson’s Marty Hart set a daunting benchmark for the buddy-cop genre. Their chemistry—simultaneously a deconstruction and an embrace of convention—has made True Detective Season 1 the standard against which all subsequent detective dramas are measured, often to their detriment.
Marketing Lanterns as a superhero detective saga inspired by True Detective Season 1 was a bold, perhaps ill-advised, strategy. The premiere possesses several similar components: dual timelines, mismatched partners, and an alien-tinged mystery. Yet it lacks the immediate narrative hook. Fifty-seven minutes in, the stakes and emotional investment remain unclear.
True Detective opened with an indelible image: a horrific crime scene in a charred sugarcane field, a young woman’s antlered body posed in ritualistic prayer. It was haunting, impossible to look away from. Lanterns, by contrast, opens with children watching a news report about Hal Jordan.
The pilot introduces young John Stewart (Aaron Pierre as an adult) in 1996, fascinated by the ex-test-pilot-turned-superhero. His brothers fear their father’s imminent return; when the father arrives in military fatigues, he stages a William Tell routine with an apple and his service pistol. John doesn’t flinch—a bizarre, jarring character introduction.
The episode then jumps two decades to 2016. John is now Hal’s trainee. Their personalities clash—Hal is chatty and rakish; John is stoic, responding with clipped “Yes, sir”s that Hal interprets as thinly veiled insubordination.
Hal insists he will never retire and that John will never become a Green Lantern, since only one is assigned to Earth. (By the time of Superman, Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner holds the ring.) Hal’s mentorship style is unorthodox: he places his ring on the dashboard and leaps from a car careening off a cliff. John dons the ring and—though unseen—conjures protective bubble wrap to survive the impact.
A Green Lantern ring materializes whatever the wearer imagines, rendered in a signature Nickelodeon-slime green. It enables flight and constructs, but Hal offers little instruction, breeding resentment. During John’s walk to a designated taco stand, a “backup copy” of Hal emerges from the ring with a message: hail is falling in Rushville, Nebraska.
Hal departs abruptly, leaving John to follow. In Nebraska, they encounter a grim scene: a football game turned massacre. Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) has history with Hal and resents his interference, suspecting alien involvement. When she bars Hal from interviewing a suspect, he instigates a bar fight—repeatedly playing “Brand New Key” on the jukebox—to gain jail access.
Kerry relegates Hal to a closet overnight; a morning bail hearing follows, seemingly excessive for a bar fight where Hal was the victim. A mysterious benefactor—Kerry’s father-in-law, William Macon (Garret Dillahunt)—secures his release. The pair visit Macon’s compound, learning he runs a substantial militia as steward for an unnamed benefactor protected by an NDA.
Events accelerate: John sleeps with a woman revealed to be Zoe Macon (Poorna Jagannathan), William’s wife. William leverages his influence to grant Hal access to the suspect, who proves to be an alien and attempts a suicidal explosion. Hal neutralizes the threat. The narrative then leaps to 2026, where a snowbound John Stewart returns to Rushville in a sequence evoking Fargo. He reunites with Kerry and discovers Hal Jordan’s frozen corpse in the football stadium stands.
The premiere is messy—not bad, but not compelling. It is neither a must-watch nor a skip.
Showrunners Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King cite inspirations ranging from Slow Horses and Fargo to The Right Stuff and No Country for Old Men. These are exceptional works; judged against them, Lanterns falls short in its opening salvo. Despite a solid cast—Chandler’s Kurt Russell-esque charm, Pierre’s piercing intensity—the premiere needed to astonish. It did not. Perhaps a series about “magic” rings was never destined to scale True Detective’s heights (a lesson The Rings of Power also learned).
Curiosity remains, but little more. The hope is that subsequent episodes justify the premise. Weekly coverage will continue.
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