DCU TV Watch: Lanterns

After Episode 1 of DC Studios' Lanterns, I wrote a post with some early general impressions and my Green Lantern commenting credentials.  Enjoy.  

I didn't want to do episode-by-episode coverage because, frankly, all you're left to do each week is say "remember the part where he did the thing?  That was cool" and then speculate a whole lot.  

But, as one can expect, the internet reaction to the show has been wild.

A whole lot of people are furious at the lack of tights on the show.  People are surprised that an 8-episode TV show - that has offered up production stills and ads for months, clearly showing our two Lanterns on Earth, with tag lines about them looking into a crime in small-town America - did not pull a switcheroo and become Power Rangers. 

People gotta weigh in.  We don't get a sense of ownership over the thing we like if we aren't there to comment early and often.  

And I get it.  I had to live for years with major motion pictures featuring a version of Superman that seemed it had been rebooted by a 13-year-old whose dad went out for cigarettes and didn't come back.  I didn't care for that take.  But I also didn't make myself everyone else's problem.

Nerd question #1:  Is this a story pulled from the pages of any particular DC comic book?  No.  

Nerd question #2:  Does it use the basic Green Lantern set-up and characters?  Yes.  

Nerd question #3:  Is it different form the comics in some ways?  Also, yes.

But so is every film and TV show of Superman and Batman.  It's just part of the tapestry of following these characters through their media evolution.  Knowledge is who all has played Superman, wisdom is knowing it's all just part of a complex history that overall feeds and expands what these stories are.  You're seeing how myths grew in the oral tradition in real time.

For Lanterns, bits are taken from a variety of comics.  We have mention of Abin Sur, we have rings choosing Hal (off-screen). John's origin is intact but widely expanded, John has his own moral compass, and sort of tapped out of being GL for a while.  But it does, honestly, lean heavily on fairly SOP detective TV and fiction.

Look, I have been through my own wave of love for all things Green Lantern, but my take is this:

The space cops are almost always far more interesting on Earth than in space.  DC's actual comic books and their stories and writing struggle with this fact.  At some point the Green Lantern comics kind of settled into an endless circle of the Corps ending (for a variety of reasons) and reforming.  We've blown up Oa.  We've blown up the Guardians.  We've blown everyone up and been down to one Lantern.  We get a new editorial team and rebuild off-screen.  

Generally, whichever Lantern you're discussing is fighting some abstraction in space, and it's just not that interesting, which is a wild thing to say, but apparently true.  So to make it interesting, the tales become further distended from anything recognizable or relatable and become increasingly batshit, which is fun once, but has the nutritional value of circus peanuts.  It can feel like superhero MadLibs reading a Wikipedia entry about any particular Lantern.

The point of comparison HBO used for marketing, that Lanterns was like True Detective, turned out to be surprisingly true.  And that's fine.  There are definite structural and narrative echoes.  While I enjoy the occasional cosmic GL adventure, I also didn't mind the effort to be as different from the Ryan Reynolds' Green Lantern as possible (we are not rehabbing that mess here). 

By making this unorthodox choice in comparison to more Super Friends-like fare, this show is part of a long lineage of neo-noir detective stories.  There are a few shows that take place in small towns like this.  One could just as easily have pointed to 2 or 3 seasons of Fargo.   Until the lasers and aliens show up, I suppose.  But at its heart, Lanterns is a windy mystery used to tell an origin story - and John will be all the more interesting when he shows up in Man of Tomorrow and we've spent eight hours with him and know who this guy is.

Most of the first five or so episodes are set in 2016, our Hal is in his fifties.  He's been a fighter pilot and test pilot.  He's been Green Lantern since 1996.  Our John Stewart has been training to be Green Lantern his whole life, and he's roughly late 20's in 2016 and 30's in 2026.

But the kicker at the end of pilot, which takes place now-ish, is that Hal was murdered.  We're figuring out what happened in a town where everyone is a suspect (but we're smart and know it will be a named character).

I think across the board, people love Kyle Chandler as Hal.  I did.  YMMV as to whether this is dead-on or not.  I think it's enhanced, but at it's core, that's Hal - a very messy guy with a lot of bravado covering up the fact he's shattered inside.  It does use some of the ret-conning from the comics from when Hal came back (that's a whole other story), and that's *fine*.  That's how this works.  Chandler has been a solid fixture of television and movies my whole adult life, and it's a great treat that he took the role and then nailed it.

Aaron Pierre was not the only possible choice for John, but, damn, man.  He sure is John - at least the one in my head as he's been presented this century.  Not many guys you can believe are an ex-marine architect, but this guy is it.  If people have complaints about the show, I really don't see how casting Pierre could be one of the problems.  There's not just a quiet intelligence to how he plays the role, there's a thoughtful emotional intelligence that makes you buy everything that happens and cheer for the guy who is not overly charming or a hugger.

I don't think I need to say too much about Kelly Macdonald.  If you don't know her, you've missed out on some great movies and television.  She's a phenomenal talent, and the small-town Sheriff stuck in the middle of all this space-faring nonsense is remarkably pragmatic and grounded.  

So - does the mystery work?  

Yes.  The question of who killed Hal was open from the first episode and seemed like it could have been anyone.  He was just that kind of guy.  And that the mystery really is only explored over the last half of the season is probably a good thing.  Our roster of named characters and why they may have wanted to bump Hal off is both very broad and very specific.  For goodness sake, Sinestro is out there somewhere (played amazingly Sinestro-ishly by Ulrich Thomsen), or the waitress who can corner John and shake him down.  There were a lot of angles.

That John is not a detective, just a smart, driven lead does manage to make it all work, even if we don't quite get what he's up to at every turn until it pays off.  And like good detective fiction, he knows the answer before we do.

Like some of the classics of hardboiled fiction, it's also not a pat ending with a shoot out with the big bad.  The eruption of violence happened much earlier and was the peak of the story's *action* but not the narrative peak.  The finale is much different, quieter, resolving as many loose threads as we can.  We don't get John standing like a bad-ass over a bloodied perp - that's not the kind of story this is.  Instead, we have justice in terms of who we've learned the characters are, not legal proceedings or shoot-outs.

Does it work as science-fiction?

I'm pretty steeped in Green Lantern lore, so I don't know what does and does not work for other people.  I think it works.  But at the end of the day, despite the space elements, the traditional Green Lantern comics, Golden or Silver Age flavors isn't sci-fi in the strict sense, it's fantasy.  

There may be *reasons* that the rings do what they do, but they're closer to hand-waving and wizardry than working through an extrapolation of scientific advances or an allegorical look at events past or present.  It's space-folk with magic rings.  Dressing it up with space sectors and a rigid managerial hierarchy doesn't change that.

In the context of Lanterns, however, it *is* allegorical.  The show doesn't shy away from any number of themes, including the Black male experience in America and the grind of years of service to any organization that demands total commitment (without giving nearly enough back), moving on from what you've known, and more.  

And, of course, merging the two genres with the eventual reveals of who did it and why, is both a solid noirish twist and brings humanity to what could be dry sci-fi pondering. 

I liked the show well enough to give it undivided attention on Sundays for the duration, maybe minus a Cubs game or something, but I'm pretty sure we kept up.  That's not nothing.  I am too old and been in this game too long to watch without looking at the gears of what something is, ponder the pieces of what the megacorporation making the show is doing. 

I just don't really get bothered if someone wants to try something new, even if it's not for me.  But this sort of landed in my sweet spot.  I like a bit of neo-noir.  I like superhero stuff.  I felt like I was watching the grown-up thing DC thought it was doing in 2013, but with real grown-ups telling a story that wasn't mistaking a bodycount for a narrative aimed at adults.

DC Studios wisely decided not to spend $40 million an episode making what some folks seem to think they should have been doing.   And, honestly, asking normies to sign up to watch a show in space or fighting Hector Hammond or Black Hand or Sonar or whatever was going to immediately limit who was going to try this show.  But a mystery show?  That treats the superhero elements like part of the show's lore?  That's catnip for people looking for a new show for Sunday night.  

Ie:  Sorry, all of you guys who think James Gunn really put his foot in it *this time* - that show was never for you.  It was not a show for nerds.  It was a show for grown-ups who like a good murder mystery.  Maybe your mom would like it?  I bet she'd like those two handsome fellows and a good whodunit.

But what Gunn is clearly not doing is following the path that Marvel has done - which is allowing all the genres of Marvel to co-exist, but requiring they have that particular Marvel feel.  Instead, we've had this, we've had Peacemaker, we've had Creature Commandos, Superman and Supergirl.  We're getting what seems to be an aggressive attempt to differentiate the slate.  We'll see how long that lasts.

But Lanterns was pulling in 19 million viewers per episode, globally, which are *astounding* numbers in our current era.  I would expect John gets a second season.