Two cops, one small Nebraska town, a body and a secret far bigger than anyone in Rushville is ready for. That’s the setup of HBO’s Lanterns, and it’s the reason the show works.
Strip away the power rings and the comic book winks, and Lanterns is a detective show. A good one. Veteran Green Lantern Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and new recruit John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), who will eventually take over Hal’s mantle, work a dark murder case that slowly opens up into a cosmic conspiracy. Chris Mundy (Ozark), Damon Lindelof (Watchmen) and comics writer Tom King created it, and they clearly know which part of their show is the engine.
The superhero stuff is everywhere. But the series is at its best when it leans into the mystery, which stays unpredictable, and into the chemistry between Chandler and Pierre, which carries the deliberate pacing.
So if Lanterns has you craving more hard-boiled mystery, good news. Plenty of great detective shows exist. Most of them just don’t have magic rings or exploding aliens. Here are five to line up once the season wraps.
True Detective is the obvious first stop
Streaming on: HBO Max
People keep comparing Lanterns to True Detective, and they’re right to. The anthology takes its time, and it (usually) pairs two detectives on a single case. Season 1, with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as Marty and Rust, is probably the closest thematic match to what Lanterns is doing.
Don’t stop there, though. Season 2 couldn’t live up to the original, but it plays like a bleak California noir, full of moody, doomed people like Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell) and Ani Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams). Season 3 gets the show back on track, with Mahershala Ali doing masterful work at the center of a mystery about memory and aging.
And the latest entry, Night Country, gives you another strong pairing in Jodie Foster’s Liz Danvers and Kali Reis’ Evangeline Navarro. Forget the Lanterns connection entirely and True Detective still earns its spot. It’s the series that paved the way for the modern version of this genre.
Spider-Noir puts a washed-up hero in a trench coat
Streaming on: Prime Video
If you want something closer to the Lanterns formula, meaning comic book source material that refuses to play by superhero rules, this is your pick. It’s 1930s New York City, and aging private investigator Ben Reilly (Nicolas Cage) can barely pay the bills. Then some exceptional events push him toward the suit of the Spider, a role he walked away from years ago.
Reilly is about as jaded as a man can get. Think Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, except he’s also a superhero who’s way past his prime.
The show pulls hard from noir and hard-boiled fiction, and its Depression-era setting feels lived-in. There’s a melancholy hanging over everything (especially if you watch the high-contrast black-and-white version), which separates it from most standalone superhero mysteries. The fight scenes are memorable and gorgeous, but the quieter character beats are what turn Reilly into someone worth watching. It’s a beautiful, witty show that knows exactly what it wants to be.
The X-Files wrote the partner playbook
Streaming on: Hulu
You can’t talk about detective partners without Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson). And yes, both shows share an extraterrestrial thread, though The X-Files mostly stays focused on grounded cases built around dark secrets.
Its whole mode is sustained tension and paranoia, mixing the paranormal with conspiracy. Mulder believes, Scully doubts, and that push and pull is the heart of the thing. The show also figured out early how to balance monster-of-the-week episodes with a bigger ongoing story, including the mystery of the Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis), who haunts all 11 seasons.
The mythology gets messy. The later seasons swing big trying to top earlier reveals. None of that matters as much as you’d think, because the real draw is watching Mulder and Scully change over time. That relationship keeps the show standing.
Mare of Easttown does more with seven episodes
Streaming on: Prime Video
For the small-town secrets side of Lanterns, go here. Detective “Mare” (Kate Winslet) investigates the murder of a teenage mother and the disappearance of a young girl, all while slowly coming apart under her own personal problems.
Easttown, Pennsylvania, feels claustrophobic. Everybody’s watching Mare, and she can’t escape their expectations or step away from the job long enough to deal with her own mess. The show cares less about flashy whodunit mechanics than about grief, and how people in a tight community carry it.
Its best quality might be its length. It wraps everything up in seven episodes and never takes its eyes off Mare, who’s a compelling character study. It’s bleak, and it won’t be for everyone. If you like small-town mysteries powered by great performances, though, this one’s hard to beat.
Watchmen is the Lindelof connection you should have seen coming
Streaming on: Prime Video
Lindelof is the obvious link here, but the 2019 limited series earns its place on its own. It’s set 34 years after Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ comic and takes a subversive run at already brilliant source material, building an alternate history of the 20th century.
It pulls the real-world Tulsa massacre out of buried history and puts it front and center, using a grounded superhero frame to dig into generational trauma and historical racism. Much of the plot follows masked police detective Angela Abar (Regina King) and her colleagues as they chase a tangled conspiracy tied to a white supremacist group called the Seventh Kavalry.
It’s less a standard whodunit and more a puzzle box, shuffling timelines and perspectives so each payoff hits harder. It feels made for our turbulent present, with a scathing, prescient critique of state-sanctioned violence and the way it so often deepens systemic bigotry.
