Green Lantern has an audience again. That’s a real turnaround after the 2011 Green Lantern film flopped, and HBO's Lanterns managed it by succeeding both as a comic book adaptation and as solid television in its own right.
The pairing at the heart of the show deserves most of the praise: Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and John Stewart (Aaron Pierre). Damon Lindelof, Chris Mundy and Tom King, the show’s creators, centered everything on that relationship, and it paid off.
Pierre is set to play John Stewart again in Man of Tomorrow, due in 2027. Until then there’s a lot of time to fill. Each of the five series below blends sci-fi concepts with some kind of mystery, and every one of them is easy to binge.
Andor shows how far a franchise can bend
Streaming on: Disney+
Lanterns sits on DC Studios’ slate, yet it plays nothing like Superman or Peacemaker. It’s proof that a creator can step into a decades-old franchise and still put a personal stamp on it. If that quality is what won you over, Andor is your next watch.
The series takes place ahead of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and tracks Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) as the budding Rebellion draws him in. His change from thief into revolutionary is the engine of the story, with the plotting of Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgard) and the battles faced by Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) running alongside it.
Where Andor breaks from the rest of Star Wars is in how closely it examines the price of rebellion. Cassian’s mother dies, and he loses Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona), the love of his life. He serves months in an Imperial prison. He also sees a horrifying genocide unfold on Ghorman, where the Empire mines the planet for Death Star materials.
Under showrunner Tony Gilroy, the series adds weight to Rogue One and to the Star Wars universe as a whole. It also makes clear how much range a brand like Star Wars has, and streamers holding onto big franchises could learn from that.
Watchmen was Lindelof’s first DC series
Streaming on: HBO Max
Lindelof had already handled a major DC property before Lanterns. Back in 2019, he ran Watchmen for HBO, a series drawn from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel.
The clever choice was making it a sequel to the comic, taking place in a world changed by the actions of Ozymandias (Jeremy Irons). Following an attack by the white supremacist group the Seventh Kalvary, police are required to wear costumes. Angela Abar (Regina King), who goes by “Sister Night” in costume, investigates a mystery connected to her own family and to one of the comic’s main characters.
Watchmen, like Lanterns, got a mixed response when it was first announced. Moore’s distaste for adaptations of his work was common knowledge at that point, and many fans questioned the point of a series when a film adaptation was already out there.
Critics were won over all the same. The series expanded on what happened in the comic and folded actual history into its plot. Doctor Manhattan supplies the sci-fi element, and everything else stays down to earth. For the nearest match to Lanterns, this is the place to begin.
Heroes got to superpowers early
Streaming on: Netflix, Tubi
Marvel and DC characters once had far less presence in film and TV. Smallville was on the air, though it connected more with devoted fans than with casual viewers. Heroes arrived in 2006 and turned into a hit.
Some of its characters could fly and some could freeze time, but they were everyday people. They join forces to prevent an approaching apocalypse, which produced the show’s well-known tagline: “Save the cheerleader, save the world.”
The series lasted four seasons, and fans broadly consider Season 1 its high point. Its cast included several actors who would become stars, Zachary Quinto among them, and it brought the sweep of comic books to television.
After that, it went off course. Fan demand for popular characters upended creator Tim Kring’s idea of making Heroes an anthology, and the 2007 writers’ strike shortened Season 2. When the show returned, it had lost much of what made it work. Still, it was the first series to locate the humanity inside superhumanity.
Fringe ends a season on a famous final shot
Streaming on: Pluto TV, Hulu, Prime Video
Fans who’ll miss the Lanterns partnership most should look at Fringe. The show centers on the Fringe Division, a secret FBI unit that works cases linked to a parallel universe. Its team is made up of FBI Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), scientist Walter Bishop (John Noble) and Walter’s son Peter (Joshua Jackson).
Fringe raises its sci-fi elements gradually, building toward some startling twists. The biggest comes in the Season 1 finale, “There’s More Than One of Everything,” which closes on one of the best final shots TV has produced.
The series explored the multiverse well before it became common, using the idea to examine identity and push the stakes higher. Fox finally had the X-Files follow-up it wanted, and this time the network didn’t cancel a sci-fi show at its peak.
As with Heroes, Fringe opened doors for the people who made it. J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman later rebooted Star Trek in theaters, a project that brought them back together with Leonard Nimoy.
Westworld takes the most effort to watch
Where to watch: Episodes available to purchase on Apple TV and YouTube
Ten years ago, HBO took its biggest sci-fi gamble with Westworld. Drawing on Michael Crichton’s film of the same name, the series is set far in the future, where the Delos Corporation operates a Western-style park stocked with lifelike androids designed to cater to all sorts of desires.
Anyone who has watched The Terminator or another AI story can guess the outline: the androids develop free will and rise up against people. What makes Westworld different is how many mysteries it piles on, among them a “maze” hidden in the park and the discovery that sentient “hosts” are already among them.
Plenty of critics and fans pitched it as Game of Thrones’ rightful heir. Instead, in an ironic twist, its path resembled that of Heroes. Two excellent seasons were followed by a mass exodus of viewers after Season 3, and Season 4 aired with little attention.
HBO Max then pulled it in the 2022 “Great Purge” of its library, which means buying episodes digitally or picking up the DVDs. Even so, it helped make room for thoughtful sci-fi on television, and Lanterns is part of that.