HBO’s Great New Sunday Night Show Is the Spiritual Successor to Both True Detective and Watchmen

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Everyone loves the idea of a creator-driven franchise until the creators actually start to drive. The big dogs of American moviemaking—Marvel, DC, Star Wars —have all at various points announced their intention to let directors and screenwriters take the wheel, to craft films that have their own distinctive sensibilities rather than serving primarily as a piece in an enormous jigsaw puzzle. And time and again they’ve gotten cold feet: Marvel pushed out Edgar Wright for trying to make an Edgar Wright movie ; Star Wars booted Lord and Miller ; DC took not just a film but an entire universe away from Zack Snyder. If the Spider-Man and Deadpool series have bucked the trend of franchise fatigue, it’s in part because they were contractually obligated to develop in their own self-contained worlds.

James Gunn and Peter Safran began their DC Universe—not to be confused with the DC Extended Universe that preceded it—with a promise we’ve heard many times before. Each movie and TV series, whether it fed into the larger continuity or not, would develop along its own lines, and that variety would be not just allowed but encouraged. Peacemaker was a gonzo satire; Supergirl , a dystopian road movie; the still-forthcoming Clayface , an unsettling body-horror flick. Gunn set the example himself, writing and directing three properties— Peacemaker , Superman , and the animated Creature Commandos —that were distinct from one another while still being distinctly his.

Extending that proof of concept beyond the DCU’s co-head has been a rockier proposition. Supergirl was a muddled, muddy-looking mess, and one that, more to the point, bore signs of being tinkered with by the higher-ups. (It was, at the very least, Gunn that chose an insufferably twee cover of “The Middle” to soundtrack its climactic showdown.) And horror director Mike Flanagan’s Clayface screenplay has been rewritten by Drive ’s Hossein Amini. (Gunn has said the changes are “ minor .”) Another movie was scrapped entirely . Thus far the mandate to let the DCU’s creators call their own shots is working out well, but only if those creators also happen to run the studio.

With Lanterns , that all changes. The series, created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King, has ties to the larger DC Universe, which grow more pronounced as its first season goes on. (Seven of the season’s eight total episodes were available to critics in advance.) But you don’t need to be familiar with the history of the Green Lantern Corps to get anything out of it—in fact, it might be better if you aren’t. King wrote the comic-book miniseries on which the Supergirl movie is based, and Lindelof was one of the prime movers behind HBO’s Watchmen , both revisionist takes on the superhero mythos (or, in Watchmen ’s case, a revisionist take on a revisionist take ). But Mundy is more of a wild card, a veteran of sordid TV procedurals (he did five years on Criminal Minds ) who crossed over to high-gloss potboilers with Ozark and the most recent season of True Detective .