‘Lanterns’ series review: Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre overcome the fears of greening out

How exactly do you make the Green Lantern gritty? Anyone who has endured Martin Campbell’s campy catastrophe from 2011 knows how ludicrous that question sounds, with an earnest Ryan Reynolds rollicking through that neon-green CGI fever dream he would later spend years brazenly lampooning from the safer perch of his wisecracking antihero at Marvel. This is, after all, a character whose job description involves a magic ring, an intergalactic police force and a battery that runs on willpower, so HBO’s decision to give him the prestige-procedural treatment by transplanting all that cosmic hokum into a True Detective -adjacent rural Americana did initially feel like another miserable indignity to inflict on this notoriously inadaptable DC superhero.