Lanterns Puts a Gritty Detective Story Inside the Green Lantern Corps, and Its Reviewer Says Ignore the Review Bombing
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HBO's DC Universe series Lanterns was teased in its trailers as something other than standard superhero hijinks — gritty realism in the register of True Detective or Slow Horses — and the Ars Technica reviewer liked the change, calling the show wonderful and telling readers to disregard the review bombing. The show runs two primary storylines; the first is set in 2016, around a mass shooting at a local football game in Rushville, Nebraska. Green Lantern Hal Jordan, played by Kyle Chandler, and his new trainee John Stewart, played by Aaron Pierre, insert themselves into the investigation, to the annoyance of Sheriff Kerry Kane, played by Kelly Macdonald, who initially doesn't believe the case has any extraterrestrial dimension.
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The interesting claim here isn't that the show is good, it's where the credit goes. The reviewer finds the rebooted DC Universe films enjoyable but forgettable, and treats Lanterns as proof of what happens when a creator is allowed real latitude inside the genre. Forgettable is a stranger verdict than bad: it suggests the problem was never the material, just the room to do anything surprising with it.
The gritty-realism billing is a register, not a renunciation. Sheriff Kane's scepticism is settled the moment the suspect turns out to be an alien who self-detonates, and it's Hal's power ring that contains the blast. Lanterns may borrow the mood of a procedural, but its cases still end in the kind of event only a superhero show can stage — which is arguably the more interesting trick.