JioHotstar’s Lanterns reimagines Green Lantern as a grounded, prestige crime drama, following Hal Jordan and John Stewart across two timelines. The pilot blends small-town murder, alien impersonators, and intergalactic politics, anchored by Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre. With Ozark’s Chris Mundy and Damon Lindelof behind the scenes, it’s a character-driven mystery that rewards close attention.
Superhero adaptations tend to follow an unsaid rule of always chasing the character's most famous iteration, the one who wore the mask/cape/ring first and got the marquee. If this sentence confused you, surprise surprise, every superhero, whether in DC or Marvel, has their mantle passed around either due to retirement or death (or, as we saw recently in the case of Spider-Noir, different universes).
JioHotstar's Lanterns, however, follows two names instead. This is for good reason, though: Hal Jordan is still the first and most recognisable name behind the Green Lantern ring, but John Stewart, the Lantern most viewers associate with the character today thanks to the Justice League animated series, was the first black hero in DC to have superpowers (the actual first hero being Mal Duncan, who made it to the Teen Titans with his boxing skills alone). In stead of having to take the difficult decision of chooing one Green Lantern over the other and incurring the wrath of half the fandom, we follow both Hal and John in the new show as the firmer trains the latter to take over the mantle if something were to happen to him.
The premiere, titled Pilot, opens on a flashback to 1996: a young John Stewart watches a television interview with Hal Jordan, already something of a minor celebrity thanks to his day job as an intergalactic space cop with a genuine taste for the spotlight. Cut to the present, John made it to being Hal's protege, but Hal isn't happy about retirement, and John just ends up looking like an overeager superhero sidekick who wants the baton right away.
Anyway, Hal is dragging John along on his latest case: a pandemonium in a small Nebraska town, that leaves four dead bodies scattered across a high school football field. Local sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) wants nothing to do with either of them, and treats Hal's claim of Lantern jurisdiction as the publicity stunt of a has-been chasing relevance. Hal, however, claims that it's an alien attack. Just that the aliens were pretending to be humans.
There's a googly here: during an exam before this event, John accidentally triggers a decade-old recorded message: "There's hail in Rushville, Nebraska." That cryptic tip sends the pair toward the town, a wealthy rancher and his wife with secrets of their own, but more than that, tips Jophn off towards a mystery that appears to reach back to Hal's earliest days on the job.
But that's not all.
Ten years later, a now-grizzled John is called out to identify Hal's frozen body, a bullet through the forehead and the ring nowhere in sight. Whatever killed a man wearing the most powerful weapon in the universe, neither Lantern saw it coming.
The ever-charismatic Kyle Chandler plays Hal Jordan, and Aaron Pierre is a stoic John Stewart who has trained his whole life to be a Green Lantern. Kelly Macdonald rounds out the local law enforcement side as Sheriff Kerry Kane, while Garret Dillahunt and Poorna Jagannathan play the rancher couple tangled up in Nebraska's alien mystery. Jason Ritter, Ulrich Thomsen, Paul Ben-Victor, J. Alphonse Nicholson, and Jasmine Cephas Jones round out an ensemble that critics have singled out as one of the show's biggest strengths. Nathan Fillion (from James Gunn's Superman) joins later in the season as Guy Gardner, the original backup Lantern whose comic-book bus accident cleared the way for Stewart in the first place (no, I'm serious, that's how he gets switched out).
Behind the camera, Ozark creator Chris Mundy serves as showrunner, co-writing with Damon Lindelof (Watchmen, The Leftovers) and Eisner Award-winning comics writer Tom King. James Gunn, Peter Safran, and James Hawes, who also directs the first two episodes, round out the executive producer roster.
DC's television output has been on an unusually strong run, and Lanterns fits the mould The Penguin set last year: take a comic-book premise and ground it into prestige crime drama. The Penguin proved earlier how there is an audience for DC properties willing to sit in discomfort without making it uneccesarily edgy. Lanterns is a buddy-cop procedural that still keeps a safe distance from the blood-and-slick of The Penguin, but still being a gritty mystery drama instead of the usual trainer-trainee buddy cop. Hal and John are investigating an otherwise very human murder with very human deductions kills, it just happens to have alien fingerprints all over it.
The writing, at least through the premiere, backs up the ambition. Mundy, Lindelof, and King know how to seed a mystery without tipping their hand early, and introducing the double timeline concept by killing off a lead character seems to work.
New episodes of Lanterns air Sunday nights on JioHotstar. Eight episodes are on the way this season, and although season two has not actively been announced, it is currently in development following the high viewership of the pilot.