Transposing the winding mythology of any comic-book mainstay to television or film usually means condensing decades of history and starting with a clean slate. Every reboot of Spider-Man and Batman re-tells their tragic backstories, or references them heavily while starting anew. Meanwhile, lesser-known properties like Guardians Of The Galaxy must be origin stories first. And should any of this prove too overwhelming to newcomers, or, to the critic’s eye, appear a poor fit for its new medium, nearly two decades of onscreen superhero dominance have provided an all-purpose, all-powerful deflection: “It’s for the fans.”
And while it’s certainly true that many of these projects start out with the most passionate followers of their larger-than-life characters in mind, the retort’s proliferation has coincided with a contortion of fan sentiment. The weaponization of “It’s for the fans,,” by studio PR and the likes, is an inevitable outcome of a subculture attempting to hang onto its underdog status while its interests become fodder for the highest-grossing movies of all time and glossy TV adaptations. The language of social rejects until the 2000s, “nerd culture” has simply become pop culture at large. Your grandmother has heard of The Avengers. The Boys is your co-worker’s favorite show. And yet you’ll still find folks acting aggrieved when, say, an attempt to bring prestige TV to Gotham City isn’t universally acclaimed.
Two other HBO series based on DC Comics properties, however, inadvertently reclaim the devotees’ defensive refrain. 2019’s Watchmen and the newly debuted Lanterns—both hailing in part from Lost and The Leftovers showrunner Damon Lindelof— really are “for the fans,” in ways few other adaptations tend to be.
Of the two, Watchmen takes the more unorthodox approach, acting neither as a ground-up relaunch of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ landmark graphic novel, nor a direct sequel to the live-action film version directed by Zack Snyder. Advancing the timeline of Moore and Gibbons’ dystopian near-future in which superheroes have either gone into hiding or become tools of a fascist U.S. government, HBO’s Watchmen follows characters both central and peripheral to its source material; while playing on recollections of Snyder’s overly faithful adaptation, the miniseries casts each role afresh. In strict continuity terms, the show is its own thing, but it works especially well if you’re vaguely familiar with the comics or movie. Its closest big-screen analog is probably James Mangold’s Logan, which, despite putting a coda on the winding continuity of 20th Century Fox’s X-Men series, treats the movies and the comics that inspired them as mythology, rather than a linear canon concerned with nitty-gritties. “Maybe a quarter of it happened,” says Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, while flipping through a comic recounting his exploits alongside Professor X, Storm, and their fellow mutants. “And not like this.”
Lindelof’s latest TV venture—co-created with Ozark showrunner Chris Mundy and DC Comics mainstay Tom King—takes a similar approach. Although Lanterns lays out its decades-spanning timeline in its pilot, it echoes the pop cultural understanding of Green Lantern as merely a semi-recognizable superhero figure, who usually plays second fiddle to heavy hitters like Wonder Woman and Superman. Some viewers know the comic mythology inside out, from the half-dozen humans and hundreds of aliens who have sported rings of various colors (each corresponding to a core emotion) to either maintain peace or sow chaos across the universe. Others have glimpsed one Lantern or another on some animated series, in the poorly received Ryan Reynolds film from 15 years ago, or last summer’s Superman.
This is a strange but daring way to approach a series that feels like it begins decades into an ongoing story (although it does—without giving too much away—circle back to fill in major blanks in coming episodes). The history of the Green Lanterns has long involved lines of succession, from Hal Jordan functioning as a total reboot of the concept in 1959—prior to which there were no Green Lanterns acting as space cops, just a single mystic named Alan Scott—to Hal’s various Earth-bound successors. These include the pig-headed Guy Gardner (played by Nathan Fillion on Lanterns and inSuperman) and the show’s stoic-but-conscientious John Stewart (Aaron Pierre). Hal, meanwhile, is played by a grizzled Kyle Chandler, who reluctantly mentors John, should he eventually usurp the mantle.
These basic details aren’t hard to parse, and are presented as one of Lanterns’ several ongoing mysteries; why John was chosen is as alluring a question as why the duo is solving murders in Nebraska. The show adjusts its superhero narrative accordingly: The lack of major set pieces and expensive, VFX-laden flashbacks plays into Hal’s history being common knowledge, both to the characters in-world, and to presumptive viewers. Perhaps the average audience member doesn’t know who Abin Sur is (or only half-remembers him from the 2011 movie), but in the Lanterns pilot, his role as Hal’s dying predecessor is practically bar trivia, alongside Hal’s betrayal by arch nemesis and former mentor Sinestro (a yet-to-be seen Ulrich Thomsen).
Ever since the show’s Hal accepted the Green Lantern ring in 1986 (and with it, the power to conjure anything he can imagine), he’s been a global celebrity, and his identity has been known to the public since he revealed it on 60 Minutes a decade later. In fact, the show begins with a 10-year-old John watching that TV interview, placing us in the perspective of someone intimately familiar with the Lanterns’ history on Earth. John is already Hal’s protégé by the time the pilot picks back up 20 years later—with the audience (hopefully) along for the ride. All it takes is accepting that these are the sci-fi mechanics of this world—a perspective that doesn’t necessarily demand foreknowledge of various comics, shows, and films, but is enriched by them without sacrificing the central drama.
It’s a stark contrast to many modern comic adaptations (especially those set in ever-engorging multiverses) that attempt to get by on fleeting references and character cameos rather than the stories they’re ostensibly trying to tell. This might work on occasion in a comedy like Deadpool And Wolverine. But when that movie’s winking casting decisions are taken seriously, the waters get muddy. That Channing Tatum’s Gambit movie was cancelled was the whole gag of his character in Deadpool And Wolverine; now he’s in Avengers: Endgame alongside actual X-Men mainstays like Patrick Stewart. 2023’s ill-fated The Flash had a similar reference for die-hards obsessed with casting lore: A computer-generated Nicolas Cage showing up as another universe’s Superman. To those aware that Cage and Tim Burton failed to get their late-’90s Superman movie off the ground, this acts as a congratulatory pat on the head. To anyone else, it’s distracting at best, and outright confounding at worst.
Watchmen and Lanterns don’t work this way. While they feature established characters, and refer to events which ardent readers might recognize, those details are world-building first and foremost—as though Lindelof and company are treating the comics as blueprints open to interpretation, rather than sacred texts to be rigidly adhered to. A major reason shows like Lost and The Leftovers struck the chords they did is because their characters were foregrounded against worlds that felt expansive and real. Although Lost’s stranded survivors had to contend with monsters and other supernatural hurdles, the hold their respective pasts still had on them moved the show’s dramatic needle. Similarly, while The Leftovers could’ve spent time detailing how 2% of the Earth’s population suddenly disappeared one day in 2011 (something it only obliquely explains in its finale), how its characters respond to the trauma of a rapidly changing world is what makes the series so enduring.
The creative mindset behind Watchmen and Lanterns follows the same creative mantra. The show’s mysteries are tethered to each world and their mechanics, but the answers yield far more satisfying results than simply pointing at one’s screen out of lizard-brain recognition. In coming weeks, long-time readers might clock snappy references to alien Lanterns like Mogo (the living planet) and Ch’p (the feisty squirrel), but these Easter eggs exist not only to re-enforce the invisible contours of a living, breathing universe, but more importantly, Hal’s perspective and his relationships. Recognition, as a reward, is merely a cherry atop a well-structured mystery sundae. Meanwhile, the tenets of dramatic storytelling—the “who” and “why” of each plotline—take rightful precedence. It’s “for the fans” without alienating the uninitiated or insulting the Green Lantern enthusiasts’ intelligence. And, thankfully, it doesn’t assume that dangling action figures above a fan’s head is all it takes to satisfy them.
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