HBO Asked for True Detective With Power Rings, Was Refused, and Got It Anyway Four Years Later
In 2022 a writing team walked away from HBO's Green Lantern series rather than deliver the note they had been given: True Detective with power rings. Four years later HBO has True Detective with power rings, it is the biggest DC launch in HBO Max history, and it still has not been renewed.
Episode three, "OutKast," drew 10 million viewers globally and 7 million in the US in three days — a series high, and the first time the show beat its own premiere. That premiere was already the biggest a DC Studios series has had on the platform, and a top-five launch in HBO Max history full stop.
Read who is counting
Every one of those figures comes from Warner Bros. Discovery's internal data. Not Nielsen, not Luminate. The company chooses the window — three days here, four days for The Penguin, same-day for House of the Dragon — and chooses whether to report the US or the world.
It also chose not to report episode two at all.
The number that is independently measured tells a different story: Nielsen's same-night count on HBO proper was 630,000 for episode one and 560,000 for episode two. Both numbers are true. One of them is a record.
Where it actually sits
- Lanterns — 6.6M US, 9.3M global, three days.
- A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (January) — 6.7M US, three days. Marginally ahead.
- It: Welcome to Derry — 5.7M US.
- The Penguin — 5.3M US, but over four days.
- House of the Dragon season one — 9.99M, live plus same day.
The season averages Lanterns is chasing: Derry at 27.1M global, The Penguin at 19.8M, True Detective: Night Country at 17.5M. It is running well, on a metric of its own making, against a field measured differently.
The show HBO rejected is the show HBO got
Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim had eight scripts, concept art, stages and a director on the abandoned Green Lantern series. Guggenheim's account of why it died: "We wanted to do something very different than what HBO wanted to do." They pitched a multi-generational two-timeline space epic. HBO wanted True Detective with power rings.
Lanterns is a murder investigation in rural Nebraska, shot as prestige crime drama, created by Chris Mundy of Ozark with Damon Lindelof and comics writer Tom King. Critics keep reaching for exactly the comparison the network asked for in 2022. Structurally, the eight scripts HBO turned down and the eight episodes breaking its records are the same note.
And it has no second season
Not ordered. Mundy, three weeks ago: "We're about six weeks into laying out a season, and then we'll talk to folks about it really soon." And: "You have to go forward with total confidence as if it's going to happen. If it doesn't happen, you also have to not be heartbroken." HBO hired a co-showrunner for the unordered season before the first episode aired.
Aaron Pierre's John Stewart is already confirmed for Man of Tomorrow, in cinemas 9 July 2027. On season one's timeline a second season could not land before late 2028. The character's next chapter is a Superman film, more than a year before his own show could come back — if it does.
One more collision worth noting
Supergirl opened in June and finished at $65.5 million worldwide against a budget north of $170 million, with projected losses in nine figures. Eight weeks later, the DCU's biggest win arrived from the project James Gunn was least involved in — Mundy says Gunn was "off doing Superman, in the trenches" and gave high-level notes with no mandate to connect anything. The supervised film needed a bailout. The hands-off show broke the record.
Episode four airs Sunday. Critics are at 92% having seen four of eight; the audience score has slid from 86% to 79%, and Metacritic users sit at 5.5. The episode that broke the record is also the one that stopped the plot for a flashback and started the season's loudest argument — and scored 9.4 on IMDb against 8.3 for the two before it.
Related: Netflix had its biggest half ever and its smallest No. 1 in three reports.