I am of two views on this TV show. On the one hand I thought it was a decent buddy cop show. On the other hand, it kind of fell flat as a super hero show. I think the big problem with the show was the budget was probably very limited. With the failure of the Green Lantern movie back in 2011, and the generally mushy reception of DCU movies in general, has made Warner brothers gun shy about big budget TV shows and movies for characters other than Superman and Batman. Since Green Lantern did not have a good track record, the decision was made to go the CW route, and keep costs to a bare minimum. Just enough special effects to remind everyone it is a super hero show, but not enough to bankrupt the producers if things went poorly.
So, was it a good show? Yes it was, the casting was spot on, they got a solid set of actors who understood the characters they were playing, and did them well. The plot was solid, the story was good, although a bit predictable. I think it took most everyone about 2 episodes to figure out the alien Manhunter was Zoe, her grandson Noah was also a Manhunter, and that Kerry was the one who murdered Hal. Honestly though, that is usually the way most detective TV shows go, pretty much anyone with an IQ above a hundred will figure it out pretty quickly, so that was not really a downside for me.
On the subject of killing Hal Jordan, I think generally comic book creators do not like Hal Jordan as a character. I think they would prefer to write John Stewart, Guy Gardner or Kyle Rayner. The problem for them, is Hal Jordan is by far the most popular Green Lantern. So the Producers simply took him off the table, so they could write the characters they wanted to. I get it, this was supposed to be John Stewarts origin story, but I think it was a mistake to kill off the Hal Jordan character.
As a super hero movie, this was not so good. As a Green Lantern story, it was down right sub standard. Green Lantern is supposed to be a science fiction hero, this show was barely a science fiction story, in 8 hours of TV, there was maybe 10 minutes of science fiction anything. They could have removed every science fiction element from the show with no impact what so ever to the story. There was also 1 real action scene in the whole series that lasted maybe 10 minutes. The rest of it was basically people being kind of shitty to each other while working through the mystery.
Okay, so as I write this and think about it, maybe this was not as good as I thought it was. I am sitting here trying to think about what I did like about the show, what stood out as the capstone moment, and I really can't think of a single one. I came into this thinking I would give it a 3.5 out of 4, but now I an thinking more like 2.5. I think the saving grace of the show were the actors themselves, who did a really good job with what they had. I wanted to like this series, I really did.
