HBO's 'Lanterns' Brings Green Lantern to Prestige TV This Sunday
HBO's Green Lantern drama Lanterns premieres Sunday, August 16 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Max, bringing one of DC's oldest superhero properties into the premium-cable slot usually reserved for crime thrillers.
The eight-episode series stars Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights) as Hal Jordan, a seasoned Green Lantern — one of an intergalactic police force protecting Earth — and Aaron Pierre as John Stewart, a new recruit paired with him. The story opens in 1996 with a 60 Minutes-style segment introducing Jordan as a formerly masked hero, before jumping into a present-day investigation: a shooting in Rushville, Nebraska that Jordan believes has an extraterrestrial element. Kelly Macdonald plays Sheriff Kerry, with Poorna Jagannathan and Garret Dillahunt in supporting roles. Seven of the eight episodes were sent to critics in advance. The Hollywood Reporter
Lanterns sits inside the DC Universe creatively overseen by filmmaker James Gunn, who is rebuilding the franchise across film and television. The recent DC film Superman featured Nathan Fillion as a different Green Lantern, Guy Gardner, in a comic-relief role — a signal that the Corps is being seeded across multiple projects. Variety
The show has three credited co-creators: Damon Lindelof, Chris Mundy, and Tom King. Mundy serves as showrunner — the writer-producer who runs the writers' room and oversees production. His credits include True Detective (season 4), Ozark, and Bloodline. Lindelof created HBO's Watchmen in 2019. King is a celebrated comic-book writer whose Green Lantern work is part of the foundation the series builds on. Variety
The show's journey to screens has been long. Producer Greg Berlanti first announced a Green Lantern-inspired series for HBO Max in October 2019, alongside a project called Strange Adventures. That early version evolved over several years into the current show, which Warner Bros. Discovery confirmed would arrive in August 2026 via a teaser released in March. HBO Max Press
The official logline describes Jordan and Stewart as "two intergalactic cops drawn into a dark, earth-based mystery" — a framing that puts the superhero premise through the lens of a small-town detective story rather than a world-saving spectacle. Warner Bros. Discovery Press
For audiences, that means the two leads spend more time asking questions in Nebraska than flying through space. Whether that approach finds the audience DC needs in the Gunn era is a question the next eight Sundays will begin to answer.
