5 HBO TV Shows Way Better Than Lanterns

By all accounts, "Lanterns" is ... a pretty good show! Dominic Griffin right here at Looper called "Lanterns" the "mystery thriller the DCU needs," and as DC Comics follows in the footsteps of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and builds up its small-screen offerings, the future is looking bright as DC Studio's head honcho James Gunn keeps producing legitimately solid content. Alongside "Peacemaker" — another DCU show on HBO — "Lanterns" zeroes in on a particular DC Comics hero, but one that's been constantly maligned over the years. (We're looking at you, Ryan Reynolds, the foremost Green Lantern hater.)

That's right: "Lanterns," true to its title, focuses on the Green Lantern Corps, made up of intergalactic peacekeepers bearing magical ringers, and specifically centers around two Lanterns. Kyle Chandler plays Hal Jordan, who's hoping to retire from the Corps and is training a new lantern, Aaron Pierre's John Stewart, as his replacement. Together, the two men team up to investigate a murder, which turns out to have more to dow ith the wider galaxy than they initially anticipated.

With all of that said, "Lanterns" is good ... but HBO has aired so many incredible drama shows throughout the years, and some are still producing new seasons every year or two. Open up HBO Max, check out "Lanterns," and then stack it against these five HBO originals, which just might be even better than "Lanterns."

Adapted from the 2011 novel of the same name by Tom Perrotta, "The Leftovers," helmed by "Lost" veteran Damon Lindelof, hit HBO in 2014 ... and at first, it wasn't a particularly big hit. In Season 1, actors including Justin Theroux (as a New Jersey chief of police Kevin Garvey Jr.), Ann Dowd (as the Guilty Remnant cult leader Patti Levin), and Carrie Coon (as Nora Durst, mourning her family) introduced audiences to a world where 2% of the population randomly disappeared one day, leaving the survivors, or "leftovers," in grief and turmoil. (Coon's Nora is the only member of her family who doesn't vanish, making her a particularly tragic figure.) With the utmost due respect to Perrotta's novel, which is great, it doesn't translate all that well into the show's debut season.

So why is this series on a list of shows "better" than "Lanterns?" Ahead of Season 2, Lindelof and his team radically overhauled the series and kept it in the world Perrotta created while expanding the scope and introducing us to Jarden, Texas, a town where nobody vanished in the event that comes to be known as the Sudden Departure. The third and final season is the show's most extraordinary outing, putting the unbelievably talented Coon and Theroux center stage as Justin and Nora, as well as characters we met in Jarden, experience major emotional journeys that conclude their stories in truly beautiful ways. Thanks to Lindelof's hard narrative pivot, "The Leftovers" is now regarded as a modern classic, and while "Lanterns" is good, this show is better.

"Succession" isn't just better than "Lanterns" — it sets a bar so impossibly high that it's actually sort of unfair to compare it to anything. Created by Jesse Armstrong with luminaries like Will Ferrell, Frank Rich, and Adam McKay as executive producers, "Succession," a modern retelling of William Shakespeare's tragedy "King Lear," sets up its series-long conflict in the very first episode: when Waystar Royco CEO Logan Roy (Brian Cox) decides to step down, who will take his throne?

Enter Logan's squabbling, power-hungry children and their hangers-on. Kendall, the erroneously self-titled "eldest boy" played by Jeremy Strong — the title of eldest technically belongs to the often overlooked Connor Roy (Alan Ruck), half-sibling to the rest of Logan's kids — sees himself as the natural successor to Logan's position. Chaos goblin Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin) also wants the job, though it's never particularly clear if he wants to do the work or simply feels entitled to the power. As for the family's only daughter Siobhan "Shiv" Roy (Sarah Snook), Shiv is desperate to prove that she's more than the token girl (or, to use the infantilizing nickname bestowed upon her by her father, "Pinky") and take power for herself. Let's not forget the aforementioned hangers-on — specifically, Shiv's social-climbing and hapless husband Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) and his favorite punching bag, distant Roy cousin Greg Hirsch (Nicholas Braun).

It's an understatement to say "Succession" is good; frankly, it's one of the best TV shows ever made, and several of its lead performers won well-deserved Emmys and Golden Globes for their roles — specifically, Cox, Strong, Culkin, Snook, and Macfadyen, all of whom are astonishingly good. "Lanterns" is at an automatic deficit here, to be honest. "Succession" is better than almost any show that goes up against it.

When screenwriter Mike White joined the 37th season of "Survivor," quite literally nobody could have guessed that his time on the island (during which he became the season's runner-up, actually) would lead to one of the best HBO originals ever made. Fueled by creativity during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and reflecting on the interpersonal strategies and deceits found in the game of "Survivor," White created "The White Lotus," which began airing on HBO in 2021 and set its first season on Maui, the second-largest island in the state of Hawai'i. With luminaries like Connie Britton, Molly Shannon, Jennifer Coolidge, Steve Zahn, Jake Lacy, Natasha Rothwell, and Murray Bartlett and (then) relative newcomers like Sydney Sweeney, Alexandria Daddario, Season 1 of "The White Lotus" sharply interrogates the class divide between the "haves" and "have nots," focusing on the very concept of wealth.

Season 2 takes place at a different White Lotus location (in this universe, it's luxury hotel and resort chain found all over the world) in Sicily, bringing Coolidge back as the daffy heiress Tanya McQuoid and introducing new players like Tanya's beleaguered assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), toxic couple Cameron and Daphne Sullivan (Theo James and Meghann Fahy), three generations of Di Grasso men in grandfather Bert (F. Murray Abraham), adult son Dominic (Michael Imperioli), and son Albie (Adam DiMarco), and the squabbling duo Harper and Ethan Spiller (Aubrey Plaza and Will Sharpe). While Season 2 investigates sex and the power it can confer, Season 3, set in Thailand, is about appropriating "enlightenment," brings Rothwell back, and features bombshell performances from Carrie Coon, Leslie Bibb, Sam Rockwell, Parker Posey, Jason Isaacs, Walton Goggins, and Aimee Lou Wood, just to name a few. Escape the dreary landscape of "Lanterns" with "The White Lotus."

Yes, Carrie Coon appears in not one, not two, but three shows on this list of programs better than "Lanterns" — because she's just that good. In "The Gilded Age" — made by "Downton Abbey" creator Julian Fellowes which is, quite obviously, set in New York City's so-called Gilded Age of the 1880s — stars Coon as Bertha Russell, the imposing and powerful matriarch of the wealthy Russell family who's married to George Russell (Morgan Spector), a deeply unethical businessman. (One might call him a "robber baron.") Because the Russells are technically "new money," they find themselves at odds with some of their friends and neighbors in New York high society, like Agnes van Rhijn (powerhouse Christine Baranski) who believes that only "old money" families should be accepted into said high society. 

With Cynthia Nixon as Agnes' sister Ada Forte, Taissa Farmiga and Harry Richardson as George and Bertha's children Gladys and Larry, and a whole host of Broadway luminaries who appear in semi-regular and recurring roles like Kelli O'Hara, Audra McDonald, Donna Murphy, Robert Sean Leonard, Laura Benanti, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and Celia Keenan-Bolger, just to name a few, "The Gilded Age" is a sumptuously gorgeous and compulsively watchable show that's also stocked full of familiar faces for theater nerds. "Lanterns" is a solid HBO drama, but if you want to watch some of the best actors of the screen and stage duke it out in stunningly elaborate costumes, give "The Gilded Age" a shot.

We know what you're thinking. After that disastrous ending (and, realistically, less-than-great final two seasons), people didn't really want to talk or think about "Game of Thrones" anymore, and if you're not particularly interested in the more dour shows that take place on the fictional continent of Westeros, "House of the Dragon" and its tale of the Targaryen family's deadly civil war might not appeal to you either. That's why we'd like to humbly suggest "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms," a buddy comedy that (respectfully) blows "Lanterns" out of the water and earned a fantastic review right here at Looper from Matthew Jackson, who called it a welcome direction for the entire Game of Thrones franchise.

Based on a series of novellas by original "A Song of Ice and Fire" author George R.R. Martin called "Tales of Dunk and Egg," "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms," under the steady hand of Martin himself and showrunner Ira Parker, casts Peter Claffey as the enormously tall hedge (or freelance) knight Ser Duncan the Tall and Dexter Sol Ansell as his tiny squire Aegon "Egg" Targaryen. The comically mismatched physical pair end up teaming up when Duncan, or "Dunk," reluctantly agrees to train Egg as his squire, having no idea that the little bald boy is a member of the royal and ancient Targaryen line; together, they deal with tourneys, palace intrigue, allies like Daniel Ings's hilarious Ser Lyonel Baratheon, and enemies like Egg's awful brother Aerion "Brightflame" Targaryen ("Backrooms" standout Finn Bennett). Sure, "Lanterns" is a good show about an unlikely pair becoming friends, but are is one guy extremely tall and is the other guy extremely short? No. We think not.

"Lanterns" is streaming on HBO Max.