For all their vaunted power, superheroes are at the mercy of the people who write them, draw them, play them on the screen, and by extension the producers and executives who decide what should go where and for how much. Sort of powerless, really.<\/p>\n
Sometimes this combination of forces works out well for the hero, and sometimes not so much. The Green Lantern, a secondary figure in the DC Comics pantheon, had the ill luck to be trapped in a 2011 Ryan Reynolds film<\/a> even its director didn\u2019t like. Fifteen years later, he has had the very good fortune to be played by Kyle Chandler, and additionally to star in a television series \u2014 \u201cLanterns,\u201d premiering Sunday on HBO \u2014 rather than a theatrical feature, with its investment in noisy set pieces and earth-shaking battles royale.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve often championed the supposedly humbler medium as the best place to tell these stories, with the time to investigate character, in all its shadings and ambiguities, and a haven for concepts too quirky or niche or … conceptual for conservative big-budget theatrical IP exploitation. And here again, I have been proved right.<\/p>\n Creators Damon Lindelof (\u201cLost,\u201d \u201cWatchmen\u201d and, best of all, \u201cMrs. Davis\u201d), comic book writer Tom King and Chris Mundy, who wrote for \u201cCriminal Minds,\u201d \u201cOzark\u201d and \u201cBloodline\u201d (in which Chandler starred), have expressly looked to television for inspiration \u2014 specifically to \u201cTrue Detective\u201d<\/a> (on which Mundy worked), with its uncomfortable partnerships, and \u201cSlow Horses<\/a>\u201d (for its disreputable hero, I guess), with \u201cSlow Horses\u201d director James Hawes helming the first two episodes. (I detect a hint of \u201cFargo\u201d as well, for its Midwestern plainscape, dark comedy and bigger-than-life yet somehow ordinary characters.)<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m a regular person, like you,\u201d Hal Jordan (Chandler) says in a 1996 TV interview that opens the series; indeed, he\u2019s only super powerful by reason of the gear that comes with the job, a human \u201cbeat cop\u201d working as part of the Green Lantern Corps, an extraterrestrial galactic peacekeeping organization \u2014 the special ring and the lantern-shaped gizmo that charges it. It gives him the ability to fly and to manifest objects at will, most often a protective green bubble, but also a bottle opener and a $10 bill. (There\u2019s a uniform, but for the most part, he leaves it in the closet.)<\/p>\n Watching that interview is young John Stewart (then a Lantern-obsessed child). We\u2019ll meet him again in 2016, played by Aaron Pierre (\u201cThe Underground Railroad\u201d), when most of the action takes place, as a former Marine sniper and art student \u2014 human talents that will prove useful \u2014 assigned to Hal as a \u201ctrainee,\u201d ostensibly to provide backup if something happens to him. Hal, after two seemingly successful decades in the job, is unused to the company and suspicious of the arrangement. (\u201cThe big blue bosses may think you\u2019re hot s\u2014 but you\u2019re just a f\u2014ing substitute teacher.\u201d) He sets John tests that might kill him, if he is not actually trying to kill him. But he\u2019s also the more genial of the two.<\/p>\n Through an agent whose identity the producers are counting as a spoiler \u2014 I\u2019m sure I don\u2019t know why \u2014 Hal receives a message that there\u2019s hail in Rushville, Neb. (i.e., aliens!), at which point he jets off from the taco stand where he\u2019s happily been signing autographs and posing for selfies, leaving John to fly there on his own, in the usual way, while the Stooges\u2019 \u201cNo Fun\u201d plays on the soundtrack.<\/p>\n They arrive, separately, in the aftermath of a high school football game that has left dead bodies on the field. (Hal suspects some sort of alien rumble.) Here we meet Kelly Macdonald, suppressing her Scottish accent as tough but tender Sheriff Kerry, asserting her jurisdictional rights. Hal finds her \u201csomething incredible.\u201d (John: \u201cI think she hates your guts.\u201d Hal: \u201cYeah, but it\u2019s the way she hates them.\u201d) Kerry is married to lawyer Billy Macon (Jason Ritter), whose father, William (Garret Dillahunt), is a local bigwig, with a cowboy militia and a wife, Zoe (Poorna Jagannathan), who possibly not coincidentally meets John in a bar.<\/p>\n At 60, Chandler is arguably more attractive than ever, with the sort of seasoning that served James Garner so well as Jim Rockford, TV\u2019s greatest detective. Five seasons of \u201cFriday Night Lights\u201d have cemented him in the popular consciousness as a preternaturally decent guy, which allows us to excuse Hal\u2019s less creditable moments, or at least to see things through his eyes. Pierre, 32, who competes in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, has the body of a superhero; he plays John wound tight, humorless, grimly ambitious \u2014 he grew up letting his father shoot apples off his head to prove his fearlessness, the primary requirement for a Green Lantern \u2014 though the character warms up across the course of the season (which also takes place in 2026). The actors are at their best in their scenes together, which the writers make happen even when it seems impossible. (Spoilers, or I\u2019d explain.)<\/p>\n Combining detective work and science fiction is nothing new \u2014 see \u201cSugar,\u201d<\/a> currently; \u201cThe X-Files,\u201d classically. (And there\u2019s an interrogation scene I\u2019m pretty sure nods knowingly to \u201cBlade Runner.\u201d<\/a>) \u201cLanterns\u201d isn\u2019t totally free of cliches, which is practically impossible for sci-fi and crime stories anyway, so many have been told over the years, and to some degree that\u2019s just what we come for. But the series is fresh enough in its details and execution, and strong enough in its writing, and so well performed, that it feels quite original.<\/p>\n I watched \u201cLanterns\u201d without any particular knowledge of the character, who has been around since 1940, and in this particular version since 1959. (I did a little reading afterward.) Happily, the show is not up to its cowl in DC cross-references and crossovers. There are fleeting mentions of Gotham and Metropolis (where Superman works) and Nathan Fillion reprises his bad-hair Green Lantern from the 2025 \u201cSuperman\u201d<\/a> movie (a long story), but \u201cLanterns\u201d comes equipped with everything you need to know. Bringing in extra mythology wouldn\u2019t make the confusing parts any less confusing, and would just confuse the parts that aren\u2019t confusing at all. Most every character, whichever side they\u2019re on \u2014 and it\u2019s not always easy to tell, given that the aliens look exactly like the humans \u2014 comes with layers. <\/p>\n Did I ever fully understand what these factions were after, or even what exactly the factions were? Nope. Did it matter? Nope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For all their vaunted power, superheroes are at the mercy of the people who write them, draw them,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":569039,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[27324,16772,156,2209,200116,107495,280206,16420,280207,15664,280208,111,139,69,5202,28203,52562,9250,61941,437],"class_list":["post-569038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-alien","tag-character","tag-entertainment","tag-father","tag-good-place","tag-green-lantern","tag-hal-jordan","tag-human","tag-john-test","tag-kyle-chandler","tag-lantern","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-part","tag-producer","tag-sort","tag-superhero","tag-television-series","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569038\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/569039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}