Some cultural objects seem to tell the future. They may strike us as urgent or novel or strange when they first appear, but, in retrospect, we understand them to be prescient, to have seen something long before the rest of us. Moby-Dick seems to have gotten the message about literary modernism about six decades early; Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is one of the best novels about the post-9/11 global order despite coming out the year prior; The Matrix understood how digital cultures could warp and transform our social lives long before most people were continually logged on. But there maybe isn’t an example of this kind of cultural prescience that’s more uncanny or uncomfortable than that of HBO’s Watchmen.
Watchmen, Damon Lindelof’s “remix” adaptation of Alan Moore’s already revisionist superhero graphic novel, appeared in October 2019. It was, and remains, a radical piece of television. Pulling the critique of white supremacy that was latent in Moore’s comic to the surface, this Watchmen looked hard at America’s legacies of racial violence. The Tulsa Race Massacre, the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI, a compulsorily masked police force tracking down masked vigilantes—this new Watchmen came to life as an evisceration of the institutions of racism in U.S. society and as a reminder of how recently Jim Crow was the law of the land. TV Twitter was obsessed, the think piece industrial complex whirred overtime, it was crowned an achievement of unusual complexity and even importance. And its spectacular finale aired right around when a novel coronavirus started passing from person to person in Wuhan.
So, right at the beginning of the global pandemic, and a few months before the U.S. would be gripped by new protest movements and police conflicts in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, HBO ran a limited series about mask politics and the racial animus of the police state.
Watchmen’s transition from speculative to reflective has been almost too much for it to bear. When I’ve shown it to contemporary college students—many of whom began college during the pandemic—they often read it as too on the nose, a cringe relic of Woke 1.0 earnestness. It’s hard, even knowing its release date, not to see it as post-Floyd, pandemic media.
The reason a show like Watchmen has this kind of power is because of its desire to use the format (and valuable IP) of a superhero show to tell a story way bigger than a series of capers or battles with archvillains. In this way, it shares a conceptual approach with other big franchise swings like Star Wars’ Andor, a show likewise tethered to a political moment with which it only kind of lines up. These were shows that took on the rich lore of their franchises and crafted something new with it. Shows about fascism and revolution, power and emergency.
Lindelof’s newest prestige superhero series Lanterns—co-created with Chris Mundy and Tom King—seems unlikely to carry that kind of uncanny resonance. Based on the Green Lantern comics, the show is clearly meant to be a mash-up of the DC Studios mythos and the HBO sensibility—much like its recent predecessor, The Penguin, which transformed the canonically silly archvillain into the anti-hero of a premium cable crime saga. Numerous reports have cited True Detective as a model for Lanterns, and it indeed has a similar format and Instagram filter. But, though Lanterns is about intergalactic gumshoes, it’s missing much of True Detective’s cosmic inquisitiveness. Green Lanterns may fly, but this show is defiantly ground-bound, in ways that are both compelling and confusing. In an era of franchise TV production that veers wildly between ambitious experiment and fan service hackwork, Lanterns is content to chart a middle course. It hurtles forward with purpose, but it never quite takes off.
I don’t know anything about the Green Lantern comics. The aspects of Lanterns that run counter to the established lore are essentially unknown to me and while I’m sure DC Studios would prefer I catch up by, at minimum, watching James Gunn’s Superman, I have no real contextual knowledge of the show’s broader universe. As a viewer of the show, this is both a liberation and a constraint. Lanterns is both made for me, and not.
The show introduces itself as a buddy cop detective series, and, for all of the cosmic kinks that twist up that genre structure, that’s basically the show it stays. At the center is John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), a young, chiseled recruit to the Lantern Corps, an intergalactic law enforcement agency. He is apprenticed to Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), the aging, creaking Green Lantern whose precinct is Earth. As Green Lantern, Jordan carries a ring that makes him essentially omnipotent, though, as Jordan readily admits, carrying such an object takes a toll. What both men know, but neither will say, is that Stewart is being primed to replace Jordan, rather than inherit his position once the older Lantern retires or dies. Jordan carries this knowledge crankily, belittling Stewart, sending him on absurd and dangerous errands, sabotaging the “training” he’s ostensibly there to receive. Meanwhile, Stewart carries this knowledge with a clenched fist and a chip on his shoulder. Pierre plays him as a man who is constantly in the midst of a breathing exercise.
The good news is that Chandler and Pierre are among the best in the business at playing these respective responses. Chandler doesn’t try to escape his iconic role as coach Eric Taylor on Friday Night Lights so much as he uses it as the raw source material for his Hal Jordan. Hazy eyed and heartsick, his Green Lantern is a loser, and he handles his current situation without a wisdom and maturity commensurate with his great power. (Chandler also plays an outdated hologram of Jordan, who is still gruff, but much friendlier, even more fatherly.) Pierre, on the other hand, is a born action hero, able to oscillate between quietly mournful charisma and yippee-ki-yay dynamism. They are a great pair, and much of the show’s pleasure comes from watching their fraught chemistry develop and devolve.
All of this takes place in 2016, just one of this show’s three timelines. In this 2016 timeline, there is supposedly a rogue interstellar robot hiding out amongst the survivalists, militiamen, and high school football players of Rushville, Nebraska, and Stewart and Jordan jet in to smoke it out. The second timeline takes us back to Stewart’s childhood in the late 1990s during which his parents train him to handle a series of nail-biting scenarios—including playing William Tell with his father—with a single-minded focus on his one day donning the Green Lantern’s ring. His father, it seems, was the preferred candidate, back when Earth received its first member of the Lantern Corps, but, due to his fearfulness, the ring passed, instead, to Jordan. The Corps’ representative (a welcome Laura Linney) treats this decision as something like a clerical error, solvable by putting the young Stewart next in line for the job that, by rights, should have belonged to his father. Of the handful of storytelling risks the show takes, this timeline’s detailed depiction of perilous parental expectation and willful loss of innocence is among the show’s most affecting. Showing us John Stewart as a Black child bearing the weight of his family’s dreams—and his father’s regrets—gives the show an emotional texture that the hayseed noir of its 2016 timeline struggles to provide.
The third timeline, though, unfolds in 2026, when we quickly learn both that Hal Jordan is dead and John Stewart is still not the Lantern. The meat of the show remains the 2016 tale, as Jordan and Stewart ingratiate themselves with the skeptical townsfolk, poking and prodding to find the alien intelligence hidden among the locals, but the knowledge of that 2026 endpoint hangs over everything. In some ways it reminds us always that we’re heading towards disappointment. The good guys will win—or survive, at least—and we have to imagine that Stewart’s ring cycle is not quite over, but the future is bleak anyway. HBO loves dramas of succession, but this is neither the Iron Throne nor Waystar-Royco we’re talking about. Has Lanterns done enough to make us care who will eventually wield that ring of power?
The show that Lanterns resembles most, far more than Watchmen or Andor, Game of Thrones or Succession, is Surf Dracula. In a now-infamous 2021 tweet, a writer named Topher Florence posted,
back in the day if you did a tv show called surf dracula you’d see that fool surfing every week in new adventures but in the streaming era the entire 1st season gonna be a long ass flashback to how he got the surfboard until you finally get to see him surf for 5 min in the finale
Lanterns is HBO’s Surf Dracula.
Rather than escaping the pressure of its source-text’s mythology or making itself an engine of that lore, Lanterns finds a niche deep within the DC televisual universe. But the show is neither freed by its distance from the core nor buoyed by its nearness. Instead, Lanterns is a process story, an HR saga set within the world of cosmic supercops. You don’t need to know much about the DC universe to understand its plot, but, not knowing anything about that universe also makes it hard to care who’s in charge of policing it. More than that, though, it’s hard for viewers—even casual ones—to dwell this long in anticipation of an outcome whose, presumably, spectacular payoff lurks just offscreen. As the critic Joshua Rivera put it, “If this isn’t a story about John Stewart becoming the Green Lantern, then what is it?”
Even as Lanterns lurches, in this final week, toward some resolution of that arc, the dawning understanding that this is a show about disappointment might be, for some, disappointing. Not every show needs to tell the future. Not every show needs to seethe with ambition, either. But a show with an identity crisis can only be fun in spurts. Lanterns is a cop show, and it’s a show about a family, and it’s a show about surrogate fathers, and it’s a show about small towns and authoritarianism (only a little bit), and it’s about corrupt hiring practices at intergalactic corporations, but all of those shows remain adjunct to a show about a big, glowing MacGuffin. Stewart’s ambivalent feelings about the ring aside, we know, as well as he, that he’s destined for it. It’s a lot to ask viewers to be disappointed along with him for a whole season. Sometimes you just gotta let that fool surf!
