Remember Glee? Of course you do. No one who has seen Glee has ever forgotten it. Early in its run, when the pop-song-spouting spawn of Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan was still in runaway hit mode, A.V. Club alum Emily St. James theorized that the series was not one show, but three, as each of its three creators had a distinct vision for the series and none of them cared all that much about what the others were doing. This creative dissonance only enhanced the manic texture of Glee and made it the definitively strange, indelible phenomenon it was, at a time when viewer interest in logging on and breaking down the creative idiosyncrasies of your favorite shows was at its peak.
You might not think that such a show would have much in common with HBO’s Lanterns. These are products of different TV eras, whose creative and commercial priorities are vastly different. As an eight-episode extension of an ongoing cinematic superhero universe, Lanterns’ odds of longevity are significantly lower than those of an Emmy-winning 2010s broadcast drama with an Elvis-sized impact on the Billboard charts,. But it is a show co-created by three very distinct voices: Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King. And just like Glee, how the show is understood largely depends on who you perceive to be the creative voice that breaks through most strongly.
For most people, this will be Damon Lindelof. The temptation to call Lanterns a Lindelof show above all else is understandable—the former Lost wunderkind is a lightning rod for discussion. As one of the foremost creators of genre fare with prestige clout, Lindelof’s TV work—which, in the past decade, has encompassed The Leftovers, Watchmen, and Mrs. Davis—is catnip to those who discuss TV on the internet. Part of that is because Lindelof, more than the other Lanterns creators, has been known for being recklessly logged-on, aware of online discussion of his work and what fans might, for example, make of the very idea of there even being a televised version of Watchmen. A fannish man with fannish proclivities, Lindelof makes a good spokesman for Lanterns..
But followers of his work will know that Lindelof also has his clear tendencies, a certain earnest texture that runs through his twisty shows, and on close viewing of Lanterns, it’s not the dominant mode the show is working in. Lanterns is very serious about being a cop show, even though it is about unorthodox and often rude cops who may not be clear about what they can or can’t do but they are sincere in their desire to get their man (or alien, as the case may be). And that show was, according to reports, what Tom King pitched when James Gunn and Peter Safran invited the comics writer into their DC Studios brain trust.
King’s ascent in the world of comics was meteoric, it took him only two years of writing books like Grayson (about former Robin Dick Grayson reimagined as a spy) and The Vision (the basis for WandaVision) before he got one of the biggest gigs in the biz: Writing Batman. King, however, would come to be known for two approaches to DC titles: either paying limited-series homage to a character from the publisher’s stable that had fallen out of fashion, or running at familiar ones in an oblique manner.
Like Lanterns is already proving to be just a few episodes in, King’s takes on DC heroes are often controversial—he’s deeply respectful of DC history but not terribly concerned with making sure his characters are aligned with the accepted fan understanding of them. When you read a Tom King DC comic, it’s going to feature the Tom King version of those characters, which may or may not be in harmony with how those characters appear in other series. This reverence-without-preciousness is uncommon in the world of comic book writers, and makes King uniquely suited for translating comics to Hollywood, where deference to continuity is a liability but being conversant in it is valuable.
To elaborate: A King comic is both an existential and quotidian affair in which superheroing is a day job that mostly happens off-panel, and the action concerns the more thankless but not stakes-less parts of the job, like managing the PR fallout, or extended arguments about ideals. The Omega Men (with art by Barnaby Bagenda) is a series-long debate between a terrorist group and Green Lantern Kyle Rayner (a member of the Green Lantern Corps altogether separate from the three seen in Lanterns) in which the latter is slowly radicalized. Mister Miracle (with art by Mitch Gerads and soon to be an animated series) asks why the most famous superhero escape artist in comics might want to escape life itself. Strange Adventures (with art by Gerads and Evan “Doc” Shaner) casts its hero Adam Strange as a war hero, but then wonders what we might be willing to excuse or overlook in order to elevate such a hero. These are heady yarns, but King moves with a pulp writer’s assured pacing, self-aware enough to know that the gravitas of a Kant or Dunne quote should always be undercut with a joke or sight gag a couple of pages later.
This is how you get a superhero show as textually and subtextually dense as Lanterns. It’s an earthbound saga of space cops whose magic ring is less a device of phenomenal cosmic power and more a symbolic vessel for the feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and entitlement felt by its two leads. And that’s before you get into all the ways those feelings keep said space cops from using the ring to do their damn job. Grappling with that semiotic payload is where the talents of showrunner Chris Mundy fit into the show’s creative trifecta.
Mundy is, in this armchair analysis of Lanterns‘ three co-creators, the steady hand at the till. He’s the one versed in pulpy crime yarns thanks to his time on Ozark and Bloodline; he’s also the one most invested in Lanterns’ viability as an ongoing series, pitching a potential second season of Lanterns alongside Halt And Catch Fire co-creator Christopher Cantwell. The texture of familiar TV shows like True Detective that comes along with Hal Jordan and John Stewart’s activities in Rushville, NE? That’s attributable to Mundy. After all, he wrote for True Detective’s Issa López-run revival, Night Country.
Lanterns, in its sardonic nature and earthy feel, reads very much like a King story, with all the foibles that entails. For some, that will be preferable to a Damon Lindelof story, or even a Chris Mundy one. King is however the most unproven Hollywood storyteller of the bunch, and while there’s much that feels filmic about his comics, how well his voice translates to the screen remains to be seen.
Of course, it’s not all resting on him, or even the combined efforts of King, Mundy, and Lindelof. Lanterns, like Glee, like every other television show made, is an effort too collaborative to fully ascribe to one voice or three, as much as it makes discussion fun and convenient. There are other writers like Vanessa Baden Kelley, who is credited with this week’s pivotal episode, “OutKast,” in addition to the directors, cast, and crew members whose contributions large and small ripple outward in ways that are impossible to quantify.
Eventually, if things are working right, a show–even a series with strong and disparate voices like Glee, or Lanterns–just becomes itself. A small army of people working in concert towards the TV show they all discovered, together. A Green Lantern Corps, of a sort.
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