It’s been more than a decade since Ryan Reynolds’ Green Lantern movie failed to impress critically and and at the box office, but the time has finally come to give the Emerald Knights another shot at live action glory. Lanterns, the upcoming DC TV show set in the new DC Universe shared continuity, stars Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre as John Stewart, and DC Studios co-head Peter Safran once described the project as a “huge HBO-quality event” in the style of True Detective. While I like the sound of that premise, the latest casting for the Green Lantern series has now given me a specific concern: will it largely eschew supporting Green Lantern characters from the comics?
Lanterns is set to follow Hal and John investigating a murder that takes place in the American heartland, and Safran has also said that this mystery will tie into the main DC Universe storyline. A few days ago, Kelly Macdonald was announced to be playing Sheriff Kerry, and now Deadline reports that Fear the Walking Dead’s Garrett Dillahunt as come aboard to play a “modern cowboy” named William Macon, another character created specifically for this show. Per the outlet, Macon is “a self-righteous, conspiracy-minded man who masks his ruthless ambition behind a charming and calculated facade.”
A description like that all but points towards Macon being a villain in Lanterns, although since this is a Green Lantern-centric series, I think we can probably count on him being connected to a bigger alien threat in some form or fashion. But the news of Macon’s involvement has me wondering exactly how deeply we’ll get to explore Green Lantern lore from the comics. Namely, since Hal and John will trying to uncover the truth behind this murder in the American heartland, does this mean the show will barely give any screen time to characters like Carol Ferris, Tom Kalmaku and Kilowog, to name just a few.
Don’t get me wrong, the idea of Lanterns channeling True Detective, a fellow HBO show that can be streamed with a Max subscription, is intriguing, especially since showrunner Chris Mundy has experience with the crime genre through Netflix’s Ozark. It’s cool to see Green Lanterns like Hal Jordan and John Stewart fight bad guys with the constructs they create from their rings of willpower, but solving a mystery requires them to use their brains in ways beyond just imagining something cool to generate with hard light. Just so long as said mystery somehow ties back to the Green Lantern property’s cosmic roots, I’ll be a happy man, and bonus points if the investigation requires them to fly into space at some point.
At the same time, I don’t want this True Detective-style mystery to move Lanterns too far away from what makes the Green Lantern mythology special. Even if they’re not series regulars, I want to see Hal and John interact with characters from the source material beyond just each other, and I worry that they’ll only be surrounded by all-new faces in Lanterns. This isn’t to say that Sheriff Kerry and William Macon won’t be interesting to follow along with, but this show should also provide a platform for the people in Hal and John’s professional and personal lives to shine… except Guy Gardner, he’s already getting that next year in James Gunn’s Superman movie.
Hopefully my fears will be alleviated as new castings continue to be unveiled in the coming weeks and months. Lanterns doesn’t have a premiere date set yet, but filming will reportedly take place in Atlanta, Georgia from January to June 2025. Given the amount of visual effects that Lanterns will surely boast, that makes it doubtful, though not impossible, that it will be ready to air towards the end of the 2025 TV schedule.
