Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre are the best reason to watch a superhero programme in some time, and Lanterns keeps cutting away from them. A patient, well-acted crime drama with a plot that will not sit still.
Lanterns takes two Green Lanterns and puts them in a car. Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) has worn the ring for years and is tired of it; John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) has just been given one and is not sure he wants it. They are sent to a small town where somebody has died in a way the local sheriff cannot explain and something not from Earth may be responsible. That is the setup for eight episodes, from a writing team that includes Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof and Tom King. It is a slow, serious police drama with a science-fiction premise, good for long stretches and, too often, in three places at once.
Chandler and Pierre are the programme. Chandler plays Hal as a man who has stopped expecting anything from the job and resents being handed a partner who still does; the weariness sits in his shoulders. Pierre gives John a stillness that is not calm, a man watching everyone around him to work out what they think he is. Their scenes together, two men in a car or across a table saying less than they mean, are the reason to stay. When a conversation is allowed to run for five minutes without a cut, it is as good as anything in the genre.
The town is well cast around them. Kelly Macdonald’s Sheriff Kane is dry, unimpressed by visitors and quietly certain she knows her own people better than any ring does. Garret Dillahunt and Poorna Jagannathan play Will and Zoe Macon, a couple the case keeps circling back to, and both can make a kitchen feel like a place where something has been agreed and never said. Ulrich Thomsen plays Sinestro, and we will say no more about him than that.
It looks the part. Gregory Middleton, Florian Hoffmeister and Armando Salas share the photography and hold to a common look: flat grey daylight, fields and car parks, nights lit by sodium and headlamps, so that the green of the ring is close to the only saturated colour on screen and looks like a fault in the picture. John Paino’s production design keeps the sheriff’s office cramped and the Macon house too clean. Stephanie Economou’s score is mostly low strings and held notes and knows when to stop. The directors, James Hawes, Geeta Patel and Stephen Williams, are of one mind about pace, which is unhurried.
The trouble is structure. The present-day case runs alongside John’s adolescence, with Cairo Cash Lee as the younger John, and there are further flashbacks around the Macons. Four editors are credited, Emily Greene, Matthew V. Colonna, Vikash Patel and Robert Abilez, and we felt the seams. Each time the investigation gets a grip, the picture cuts back to the past, and when it returns the grip has gone. The flashbacks are not bad; some are the most direct thing the show does about who gets handed power and who has to earn it. But there are too many and they arrive too regularly, like a timer going off.
In the third episode Pierre is alone with the ring, working out what it is asking of him and who decided he should have it, and it moved us more than we expected a scene about a piece of jewellery to. It is played almost in silence and Pierre does it with his hands. Then the following episode spent most of its length in the past, and we found we were waiting, and then irritated at waiting, for a programme that had just shown us it did not need to.
Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen (2019) took a comic and knew exactly what it wanted to say with it. Lanterns has the seriousness and some of the ambition, but has not decided whether it is a murder mystery with aliens in it or a story about two men and a ring with a murder for an excuse.
Worth an evening a week if you like your heroes tired and your towns grey, and if you are prepared to be patient with the cutting. Anyone hoping for spectacle should know there is little, and the show is not sorry. It carries a 15 certificate.
