Lanterns is streaming on HBO Max, and if you have skipped it because of the logo on the front, that is the wrong reason. The setup is two Green Lanterns, one veteran and one recruit, sent to investigate a murder in rural Nebraska. What it plays like is a two hander crime drama in which the cosmic hardware is the least interesting thing in the room.
Chris Mundy is the showrunner, working from a series Damon Lindelof and Tom King developed with him, and the shape is procedural rather than origin story. A split timeline, a small town that knows more than it will admit, and long stretches where nobody uses a power at all. The ring is a complication inside a murder case, not the engine of the plot.
Aaron Pierre plays the recruit with a soldier's stillness, and Kyle Chandler is doing the thing he has always been unreasonably good at, which is making weariness look like competence. The series holds an 8.4 on IMDb, and the reason is almost certainly those two in a car together.
It matters that this is early DC Universe television rather than a legacy holdover. The house style being set here is patient and unglamorous, closer to prestige crime than to a franchise launch, and it quietly makes the case that a comic book property survives best when the property is not the subject.
It is on HBO Max in the US, and through the HBO Max Amazon Channel if that is how you subscribe. Start it on a night when you are willing to let a first episode take its time, because it will.
