Nathan Fillion’s New HBO Cop Show Is The Complete Opposite Of The Rookie

Nathan Fillion is one of the most prolific actors in Hollywood, and while he never got the movie star career he deserved — the roles of Nathan Drake and Hal Jordan both slipped right through his fingers — he remains an enduring icon of television. On the small screen, Fillion has starred in everything from massive hits to underappreciated cult classics. His space western Firefly wasn’t appreciated in its time (mostly because Fox executives made the asinine decision to air the episodes out of order), but all these years later, it remains a beloved fan-favorite.

For the past eight years, Fillion has been starring in The Rookie on ABC. He plays 40-something John Nolan, the oldest rookie at the Los Angeles Police Department. The character was based on real-life L.A.P.D. officer William Norcross, who moved to Los Angeles in 2015 and joined the police in his mid-40s. It’s a unique spin on an old-school cop show, but it also satisfies as an old-school cop show, much in the way that The Pitt satisfies as an old-school medical drama despite its real-time conceit.

The Rookie is still going strong, with a spinoff on the air, a ninth season on the way, and another spinoff in the works. But Fillion has already lined up another police procedural, and not only is it set to be one of the hottest new shows of the summer; it also couldn’t be more different from The Rookie.

On August 16, HBO is set to premiere its next big franchise spinoff (wedged between the third season of its Game of Thrones spinoff and the first season of its Harry Potter remake), and it’s one of the more promising projects to come out of HBO’s gradual transformation into an I.P. content farm. Similar to Watchmen or The Penguin, Lanterns will approach a superhero-infested comic book world as realistically as possible.

HBO’s Lanterns Will Show Us A New Side Of Guy Gardner

Lanterns will see Fillion reprise his role from last summer’s Superman as Guy Gardner, an arrogant Green Lantern with a blond bowlcut and a chip on his shoulder. Set in James Gunn’s ongoing DC Universe (which just suffered its first major setback with the box office disappointment of Supergirl), Lanterns is a police procedural about the day-to-day operations of the ring-wielding space cops of the Green Lantern Corps.

If you’ve ever read a Green Lantern comic, you might be expecting a high-flying intergalactic adventure with lots of oddball aliens and distant planets. But Gunn and co. have actually approached the series more as a grisly HBO murder mystery in the vein of True Detective or Mare of Easttown. It won’t jump all over the cosmos; it’ll follow one specific investigation into one specific death in Nebraska. Tonally, it’ll be closer to The Rookie than Star Wars, but its cop-show premise is the opposite of The Rookie.

The exact timeline of Lanterns is still a little confusing — it’s unclear how it fits into the larger story of Superman and Supergirl and Peacemaker — but the central buddy-cop dynamic is an aging, grizzled veteran Hal Jordan partnered with a young hotshot John Stewart. Hal will be John’s primary mentor in the series, but Guy’s appearance suggests he’ll have some influence, too. In The Rookie, Fillion plays the rookie, but in Lanterns, he’ll play one of the elder statesmen mentoring the rookie.

Since it’s airing on HBO, where there are next to no content restrictions (The Chair Company had on-screen fellatio last year!), Lanterns will show us a whole new side of Guy’s character. He already pushed the boundaries of Superman’s PG-13 rating by conjuring up giant green middle fingers, but Fillion will really be allowed to let loose with his supporting role in Lanterns. He can cuss, he can kill, and he can have graphic sexual relations.

Lanterns

Release Date

August, 2026

Network

HBO

Showrunner

Chris Mundy

Directors

James Hawes

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  Aaron Pierre

  John Stewart

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  Kelly Macdonald

  Sheriff Kerry