Lanterns Season 1 Review: DC's Grounded Gamble Pays Off
Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King bet on a small-town murder mystery over a space opera, and the bet paid off.
Spoilers ahead for the first seven episodes. The finale is discussed in general terms only, and nothing about how the mystery resolves is given away.
For eight Sunday nights running, Rushville, Nebraska had a standing appointment in our living room. My wife balks every time I suggest we catch up on anything with a shared universe attached to it (sorry MCU), and yet by week three she was the one asking me when the next episode was ready.
Getting here took a decade. Greg Berlanti had a Green Lantern series in development at HBO Max back in 2019, a sprawling multi-era thing built around Alan Scott and Guy Gardner, and it was scrapped and rebuilt from the studs when James Gunn and Peter Safran took over DC Studios. The version we got was announced in January 2023 as part of Chapter One: Gods and Monsters, pitched from the jump as an Earth-based detective story rather than a space opera. HBO ordered eight episodes straight to series in June 2024, with Ozark's Chris Mundy as showrunner alongside Damon Lindelof and Tom King, who pitched the concept in the first place. Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre were cast that October, cameras rolled in Los Angeles through the first half of 2025, and after sliding out of its original early-2026 window the show premiered August 16.
The show runs on two clocks. In 2016, veteran Lantern Hal Jordan gets dragged into a mass shooting in a small Nebraska town he's convinced has an extraterrestrial fingerprint on it, with rookie John Stewart along as the trainee the Guardians have lined up to replace him. What the two of them turn up is a Manhunter, one of the artificial beings the Guardians built and then spent eons trying to bury, hiding in plain sight inside the town's wealthiest family. In 2026, John comes back to Rushville and finds Hal dead with his ring missing. We also get peeks into 1976 and 1996 to see young Hal and John respectively, but the core of the story cuts between those main two timelines, and the question of who killed Hal Jordan is what the whole season hangs on.
Early reception was warmer than the skeptics expected, though the skeptics were loud. Critics landed around ninety percent positive, with Empire at four stars and IndieWire grading the season an A-, while a persistent minority complained that the premiere crammed too much into one hour and that the show seemed faintly embarrassed by its own source material. The Hollywood Reporter loved the chemistry and found the comic book material undercooked. Variety praised the character work and felt the series leaned too hard on the prestige dramas it admired. If you were anywhere near the discourse in late August, you saw a lot of fans asking where the green went.
Then, it took off. Viewership climbed week to week rather than bleeding out, and when "Lights Out" aired on September 13 the conversation flipped entirely. Episode five converted the holdouts: a full siege of Rushville that burns down half the season's board, detonates the partnership between Hal and John, and ends on consecutive gut punches with John walking away from the ring he'd trained his whole life to earn. IGN gave it a nine, IndieWire called it the most thrilling hour the series had produced, and fans spent the week arguing it was the best hour of superhero television all year. Fair enough. It plays like a finale, which is both the appeal and the trouble.
After that, Lanterns downshifts on purpose. The back three jump a decade forward and hand the story to John, now ringless, bearded, and working as an architect. Hal sticks around as the holographic backup consciousness stored in his own ring, a gimmick that could have been insufferable and instead hands Chandler his best material of the season. Nathan Fillion's Guy Gardner finally shows up, and the show quietly establishes that he only got the job because John turned it down, which is a wonderfully deflating origin for a guy who struts like that. Episode six took some fair knocks for pacing, and episode seven is openly a table-setter. One heads up for anyone who needs it: the back half deals directly with depression and inherited suicide, and it handles both with real care.
The finale is quiet, and I suspect that's going to divide people. It answers the central question in a way that grows out of character rather than spectacle, leaves a couple of Sinestro threads flapping, and closes on John putting the oath into his own words. Nerdist figured it mostly stuck the landing. Personally, I'd lose the qualifier.
Tom King's fingerprints are all over this show, which is a blessing and a curse depending on who you ask. There are die-hard King readers, myself included if I'm honest, who will buy whatever book has his name on the cover. There are others who find his work formulaic and predictable, too sentimental by half, and a little too eager to deconstruct heroes who were getting along fine without the help. Here his imprint lines up exactly with what the season is about: forgiveness, and the fight against the circumstances of your own upbringing. Pierre's John Stewart, Chandler's Hal Jordan, Kelly Macdonald's Kerry Kane, and even the Manhunter are all waging the same war against the weight of expectation. The decision to keep the story in Rushville rather than sprinting to Oa is a piece with that. We get a couple of off-world field trips, but the small-town setting gives all that interior work somewhere to live, and it keeps the show legible to anyone who couldn't pick a Guardian out of a lineup.
The acting is superb from top to bottom, starting with Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan. Chandler has been a reliable television presence for the better part of forty years, and I first met that smirking smart-aleck in Early Edition back in 1996, long before the Friday Night Lights run that won him an Emmy in 2011. He's an inspired pick for an older Hal: smarmy, cocky, and thoroughly sick of the Guardians breathing down his neck with a trainee who looks like he was built in a lab to take the job. The rough exterior crumbles over eight episodes, and what's underneath is a man who has been fighting a battle nobody around him could see.
Pierre is a superb foil. Hal has spent decades doing things his own way, much to the chagrin of the Guardians, while John is the long-term investment they hope will finally solve their Hal problem. He's an obedient soldier to a fault, shaped by parental conditioning that isolated him from his brothers and marked him as the chosen one, and his disillusionment lands all the harder when he realizes the ring tends to break the people who take it up to keep the peace. Pierre's command of that stern countenance also makes his comic beats funnier than they ought to be. Macdonald, for her part, is the season's knockout. Kerry defies the useless-local-cop archetype completely, plugged into her town and sitting much closer to the truth than either Lantern clocks, and fearless in a room with a man who can conjure anything he imagines. Her work in the last two hours of the season elevates the role into something else entirely.
Even the tertiary players get their moment. Jason Ritter's Billy Macon is the kind of part that usually gets three scenes and a shrug, and I'd push back on the reviews calling him underused, because what Ritter does with a lawyer doing his father's bidding gives the Macon family its load-bearing wall. Of course, Fillion’s Gardner continues to be inspired, and with that goofy bowl-cut you would say he was born to play the part.
Pacing is the one thing keeping this from perfection. The first five episodes ramp to a fever pitch, and while the slowdown bought us those gorgeous introspective hours with Hal, there's no denying some key momentum was lost in the wake of such a bombastic climax.
Which brings me to the approachability, and the best argument this show has going for it. My wife has no relationship with Oa, the Guardians, the Justice League, or any of the lore DC could have dumped on us from the jump. She stayed because the story was grounded and familiar, with just enough superhero in it to lift the thing past a street-level detective yarn. I filled in a gap here and there (though I'm no Green Lantern aficionado myself), but even lacking those context clues, the core of the narrative remained intact.
So: there's a lot of chatter about the DCU right now. Supergirl didn't land the way anyone hoped, and the naysayers have Gunn's whole vision on a countdown clock. Lanterns is the counterargument, and it's a strong one. In my view, if Gunn’s vision for the DCU is more content like Lanterns, I think we’re in for some more excellent material in the years ahead.
Lanterns - Season 1
Grounded, superbly acted, and approachable enough for viewers with zero DC background, Lanterns loses a little momentum after its explosive fifth episode but never loses the thread.
