Critics Gave HBO's Superhero Show 'Lanterns' 94 Percent. One Rave Calls Its Action 'Perfunctory.'

Ninety-four percent of the 99 critics counted by Rotten Tomatoes have marked HBO's "Lanterns" positive, and Metacritic has the season at 72 from 38 reviews. Both were read on August 28, 2026, and both are snapshots that move as reviews post: in premiere week this was 90 percent from 40 critics. What neither number says is that the critics were grading an incomplete season.

The series premiered at 9 p.m. on Sunday, August 16, 2026, with Aaron Pierre as John Stewart and Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan, and Kelly Macdonald as a small-town sheriff. Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof and Tom King created it. The Hollywood Reporter's chief television critic, Daniel Fienberg, reviewed it on August 14, 2026, based on seven of the season's eight episodes. The finale was not sent to critics.

That is the ordinary way prestige television gets graded now, and it is worth saying plainly in the town that builds these shows. A season collects its verdict before its last hour exists.

My thesis, one line

The prestige superhero show is a swap, not an upgrade. Take out the cape fight, put in a murder mystery, a dusty main street and a sheriff with a secret, and the grade goes up without the writing having to. Slow is not deep. Slow is cheaper.

The rave itself makes the case better than I can. The controlling comparison in the THR review is not to a comic book. It is to Jack Reacher: an oversized outsider strolls into a small Nebraska town, undermines local law enforcement, and refuses to leave until he has unraveled a mid-level conspiracy. The review runs through the checklist — tense cafe scene, dive-bar brawl, pickup trucks, a nativist rancher with militia leanings. The comparison people keep reaching for on this one is True Detective. Nobody reaches for a comic.

Then there is the money. Of the seven episodes critics saw, exactly one goes full action, per the THR review. Fienberg writes that it feels like it consumed 75 percent of the series budget, and calls the execution "perfunctory instead of exhilarating." Two other episodes he describes as "not exactly bad but thematically thin." That is three of seven hours where the argument for the show is the absence of the thing it is nominally about.

The tell is the ring. In the show, the outlet reported, the Green Lantern ring sits permanently at 5 percent charge, which gives the production an excuse to use computer effects sparingly. My read: that is a budget line rewritten as a character note, and the genre has trained us to call it restraint.

What the praise actually praises

Fienberg's closing wish is for the two leads to wander into new towns with a depleted ring for eight episodes a year. He writes that his investment ended up in the characters rather than the galactic stakes, which the review says never really materialize, and that a cameo from another Green Lantern left him unmoved. Take that seriously. The best case anyone has made for this superhero series is the part where it stops being one.

None of this lands on the cast. The chemistry between Pierre and Chandler is the thing every review agrees on, and I have no reason to doubt it. The complaint is with a format that gets to bank credit for atmosphere while postponing the spectacle it was greenlit to deliver.

What would change my mind is specific and currently unavailable: the eighth episode, which no critic reviewing this season had seen, and whether the galactic stakes ever arrive in it. Until then, a 94 percent score is measuring seven-eighths of a show and one-quarter of an argument.

Source: hollywoodreporter.com, retrieved August 28, 2026.