Marvel may have delivered a huge quantity of TV shows in the past few years on Disney+, but DC Comics has been quietly delivering quality, from “Watchmen” and “Peacemaker” to HBO’s “The Penguin,” which turned the classic Batman villain into a mob world antihero — and took home nine Emmys for it.
TV shows based on comic books can be tricky, though: Sure, they deliver thrillingly high stakes and spectacular action, but they can also saddle viewers with tons of dense mythology in order to understand all that action. HBO’s new DC series “Lanterns” (premiering this Sunday at 9 p.m.; I’ve seen the first five episodes) brings a prestige TV sheen to the superhero genre with gritty realism and a sly sense of humor, not to mention a fantastic performance from Kyle Chandler. But once it starts piling on the mythology and explosions, it loses what made it distinctive in the first place. It actually gets less interesting the more spectacular the action gets.
“Lanterns” does get off to a strong start, introducing us to Chandler’s Hal Jordan, a former test pilot who’s now a beloved superhero known as the Green Lantern, bopping around the planet thanks to a magical ring that gives him superpowers. Hal is getting up there in years, though, so he’s training military sniper John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) to be a Lantern like him, and his teaching style is decidedly tough love: He sends John’s car careening off a cliff, leaving him to figure out for himself how to survive. (He does, of course.) While they’re still in training, Hal and John team up to investigate a mass shooting at a high school football game… where the victims may or may not be from another planet.
Lanterns is better as a crime drama than a superhero spectacle
With “Watchmen” alum Damon Lindelof as co-creator and Chris Mundy (“Ozark”) as showrunner, the initial episodes of “Lanterns” are nothing flashy… and that’s a compliment. They’re endearingly low-key and grounded in an authentic humanity that’s rare in the comic book genre, and we get dashes of deadpan humor, too, as John slowly learns the ropes of being a superhero. (Hal gets frustrated by how slowly he learns, actually.) The producers have cited “True Detective” as an inspiration, and we can see that in the central mystery that brings in “Boardwalk Empire” veteran Kelly Macdonald as a local sheriff and Garret Dillahunt as a macho rancher commanding a well-armed militia. While the magic ring is fun and all, “Lanterns” works best when it’s playing it straight, keeping the supernatural bells and whistles in the background.
But this is a superhero show, after all, and soon enough, it feels like we’ve been dropped in the middle of a very complicated story without a lot of context. Admittedly, I don’t have much knowledge of the Green Lantern beyond the old “Super Friends” cartoon, but I feel like I’d need a Ph.D. in comic book mythology just to follow all the characters and jargon being thrown around here. (A lot of scenes in “Lanterns” are just people explaining complex lore to other people.) “The Penguin,” meanwhile, played like an elevated crime drama that anyone could watch and enjoy, even if you don’t know who the Caped Crusader is.
As “Lanterns” goes on, characters start arriving from other planets with bewildering talk of “Guardians” and “manhunters,” and the narrative hops and skips across timelines to the point of confusion. (It doesn’t help that a number of scenes are too dimly lit to even see what’s happening.) Throw in clunky romantic subplots, hokey childhood flashbacks, and an underwhelming bad guy reveal, and the simple, grounded vibe of the early episodes has mostly evaporated by midseason.
Kyle Chandler is a standout, but Lanterns suffers without him
Kyle Chandler is a joy to watch as Hal, though. He has the weathered swagger of a man who’s too old to give a damn anymore, blasting ’70s rock in his classic car and soaking up the adulation of being a real-life superhero. (He mostly uses his magic ring to conjure up a bottle opener for his beer and counterfeit money to play the jukebox.) He’s a long way from the tough but tender Coach Taylor that Chandler played on “Friday Night Lights” — Hal is more of a grumpy mentor in the vein of Tom Hanks’ character in “A League of Their Own” — but it’s a nice change of pace for Chandler as an actor. It’s maybe his best performance since “FNL,” actually. Aaron Pierre is soft-spoken but compelling, too, as John Stewart, and he and Chandler bring an entertainingly prickly teacher-student dynamic to John and Hal.
But “Lanterns” loses a significant amount of its zip when Hal isn’t in the picture, and it’s disappointing to see it rely so heavily on whiz-bang special effects and extraterrestrial bad guys in the later episodes after starting out on a more tangible, relatable level. It’s a bit reminiscent of my experience with Disney+’s “WandaVision,” which began as an ingenious parody of TV sitcoms across the decades but eventually culminated in just another Marvel comic book battle where superpowered foes hover in the air and slam each other with energy blasts. I liked it better as a sitcom parody, and I liked “Lanterns” better, too, when its feet were firmly grounded on Earth.
THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: HBO’s “Lanterns” gets off to a strong start, adding realism and humor to the superhero genre, but it get bogged down by too much comic book mythology.
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