I Like Lanterns. I Just Can’t Take It Seriously.

We need to have a very serious conversation about Lanterns.

Okay, maybe not that serious. This is Green Lantern we’re talking about, and there is no honest way to discuss this show without first addressing the many things that should make it completely unwatchable.

I’m not going to lie and pretend I’m not enjoying it. I am.

Kyle Chandler, forever Gary Hobson from Early Edition to people of a certain age, brings an enormous amount of charisma to Hal Jordan. Aaron Pierre is equally compelling as John Stewart. Together, they have enough presence to make HBO’s dark, Earthbound mystery work.

There is just one problem.

Green Lantern is hokey as hell.

Here is a superhero who received his powers from an alien ring. That ring allows him to create almost anything he can imagine. Giant fists. Enormous hammers. Elaborate weapons. Whatever the situation requires, the ring can apparently whip up a glowing green solution.

But the most powerful weapon in the universe only works while it is charged.

Like a cell phone.

The charger is a giant green lantern, and activating it involves reciting an oath that begins, “In brightest day, in blackest night.” I’m not entirely sure what powers the lantern itself, but perhaps that is a question for another episode.

None of this is meant as an attack on the mythology. Green Lantern has been around for a long time, and plenty of fans have accepted these rules without difficulty. Put them inside an animated series or a colorful comic book, and they belong perfectly.

Put them inside a grim HBO crime drama, however, and something strange happens.

Lanterns carries itself like the fate of the human soul is being debated somewhere in the middle of True Detective. It is dark, grounded and aggressively serious. Its characters speak in loaded silences. Its landscapes look haunted. Every conversation seems to conceal a terrible secret.

Then someone has to recharge a magic ring with an oversized novelty lamp.

That collision was impossible to ignore during the second episode. Lanterns wants to be a prestige drama, but its comic-book machinery keeps wandering into the frame and threatening to turn the whole production into an unintentional comedy.

Perhaps HBO already knows that.

The first episode occasionally felt like DTF St. Louis without all the strange sex stuff: two men circling a mystery in small-town America while an increasingly bizarre personal dynamic develops between them. That similarity may not be intentional, but once I noticed it, I could not stop seeing it.

The same is true of the Green Lantern mythology itself. The more seriously the show treats it, the funnier it can become.

That does not mean the show is failing. In some ways, it may be succeeding despite itself. Chandler and Pierre make the characters believable even when almost nothing surrounding their powers should be. The central mystery remains intriguing. The performances are strong. Most importantly, I want to see what happens next.

I want to like Lanterns.

The problem is that I already do.

I will probably consume every episode HBO gives me. I may even become emotionally invested in this solemn intergalactic police force and its rechargeable jewelry. But enjoying the show will not stop me from laughing when its prestige-drama ambitions collide with the wonderfully ridiculous character at its center.

Maybe that is the point. Maybe Lanterns understands that Green Lantern is inherently absurd and is waiting for the audience to catch up with the joke.

Or maybe HBO has produced the darkest superhero comedy on television entirely by accident.

Either way, I’ll be watching.