“Lanterns”: Galactic heroes prowl Nebraska

For their entire careers, writer-producers Damon Lindelof and Chris Mundy occupied opposite corners.
Lindelof has been in whimsyland — “Lost,” “Watchmen,” “The Leftovers” and fantasy films. Mundy has been in on gritty, crime-strewn turf — “Ozark,” “Criminal Minds,” the Jodie Foster season of “True Detective.”
What could nudge these writer-producers together? “Lanterns” (shown here) debuts at 9 p.m. Sunday, for an eight-week season on HBO and HBO Max.
Yes, Lindelof said, it has the Green Lantern guys, with their magic rings. But “it has een described as a ‘True Detective’ story on Earth.”
The Lantern corps works throughout the galaxy, but this time the case –which may or may not have intergalactic twists — is in Rushville, Neb.
Why Rushville? That involves a third writer-producer, Tom King, who knows opposite worlds.
He spent seven years as a counter-terrorism officer for the CIA, then switched to superheroes — first in a novel and then as an award-winning writer of DC comics, including “Green Lantern.”
Also, King grew up in Los Angeles and went to college (Columbia) in New York City, but was strongly influenced by his grandmother. “She rode a horse to school and there were only three people there,” he said. “To me, that was an alien planet.”
That was in Rushville, a Nebraska town that’s a county seat, but still has only 877 people. It’s a new world for the Lantern folks, and for some of the actors:
— Kyle Chandler (right), 61, spent his teen years on a Georgia farm and is best known as the “Friday Night Lights” football coach. Now he’s Hal Jordan, a role he said surprised him. It was “‘Oh wow, I can be a superhero?'”
–Aaron Pierre (left), 32, is from London and starred as Malcolm X in the “Genius” mini-series. Now he plays John Stewart, a Lantern recruit whose calm exterior is deceptive. Inside, Pierre said, “he’s a tornado, he’s a volcano.”
— Kelly Macdonald, 50, plays the local sheriff, who doesn’t approve of these outsiders. Macdonald (an Emmy-winner for “The Girl in the Cafe” and nominee for “Boardwalk”) is Scottish, but says she’s always been a cowboy fan, comlete with “cowboy boots in my closet in Glasgow, which makes no sense at all.”
Then there’s Poorna Jaggannathan, 53, who had a global upbringing (following her father’s career as an Indian diplomat), before going to college in the U.S. Her character (Zoe) and Stewart, she said, have some things in common, as “probably the only two people of color in a very white town.”
(The real-life Rushville might be far more diverse. The 2010 census said it may have had six Black or Asian people. Overall, the town was about 74 percent white, 22 percent Native American).
Others include Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner, the Lantern he played in last year’s Superman movie, and Garret Dillahunt as a local cowboy.
That’s a modern cowboy, of course. In part, Mundy said, the producers thought of such films as “No Country For Old Men” … which, by coincidence, included both Dillahunt and Macdonald.
The setting may be rustic and the heroes may be galactic, but Jagannathan said the story is still basic: “It’s a whodunit, a bit of a murder mystery — but also a profound dissertation on power.”