Lanterns was pitched as a detective show before anybody wrote a word of it. Peter Safran stood up at the DC slate presentation in January 2023 and described the vision as “very much in the vein of True Detective,” and James Gunn has since credited Tom King with wanting a version of Green Lantern built on exactly that. HBO’s own logline calls Hal Jordan and John Stewart “two intergalactic cops drawn into a dark, earth-based mystery with cosmic ties as they investigate a murder in the American heartland.” The show has delivered on it, too. Four episodes into an eight episode season it holds 92% on Rotten Tomatoes from 121 critics, its premiere pulled 9.3 million viewers worldwide inside three days, and our own read has been that the grounded approach is the right call. That score made it the DCU’s first television hit of the year, and it has climbed with every episode. None of what follows is an argument that it is bad.
It is an argument that the lane it is driving in was paved a long time ago, and that some of the strangest work in television happened there. A detective show earns the word off-beat by breaking the form open rather than decorating it, which means a quirky lead or a moody color grade does not count. Three of the four below sit in the same category as the shows almost nobody talks about that turn out to be close to perfect, which is part of why they are worth naming. Every show below meets four conditions. An investigation is the engine rather than the wallpaper. Its central formal choice genuinely changes how detection works. Its run is finished, so you can watch the whole argument. And it holds a higher critic score than the 92% Lanterns is sitting on, which is a high bar and the reason this list is four shows long instead of ten. They are ordered by that score, lowest to highest, and together they run 76 episodes.
Bryan Fuller’s series ran on ABC from 2007 to 2009 and solved its murders by asking the victims who did it. Ned is a pie maker who can bring the dead back with a touch, but only for sixty seconds before something else nearby dies to balance the ledger, and touching them again returns them to eternal slumber permanently. A private investigator works out what this is worth and the two of them go into business on reward money. That premise does something no other detective show has managed, which is to make the interview the entire case. There are no clues to gather and no suspects to narrow down. There is a minute with a corpse, and a conversation that has to get somewhere before the clock runs out.
What keeps it from being a gimmick is that the rule cuts both ways. Ned revives his childhood sweetheart Chuck in the pilot and cannot ever touch her again, so the show’s central romance is conducted through gloves, plastic wrap and the length of a car’s bench seat. The cases are candy-colored and the emotional machinery underneath is genuinely cruel. Two seasons and 22 episodes exist and the second was cut short by the 2007 writers’ strike and never recovered its audience. One warning worth giving plainly: it is the only show on this list you cannot stream, and remains available in the United States through digital purchase only.
Rian Johnson’s series is the closest thing on this list to what Lanterns is attempting, which is a grounded American road mystery with one strange element bolted to it. Charlie Cale can tell when a person is lying. That is her whole power, and Johnson is disciplined about how little it gives her. She knows a statement is false. She does not know what the truth is, who else is involved or what any of it means, so the lie detection opens the case rather than closing it, and everything after that is legwork.
The structural move is the one that matters. Each episode shows you the murder first, in full, with the killer’s identity never in doubt, and only then rewinds to put Charlie somewhere in the frame. You are not solving anything. You are watching a woman with one useful instinct assemble what you already know, which converts suspense into something closer to dread. It also revives a format television abandoned, the self-contained weekly case with a rotating guest cast, and the show fills those slots with people who clearly wanted to be there. Two seasons, ten episodes and then twelve, 22 in total, and Peacock cancelled it in November 2025, which makes it finished rather than interrupted. It streams on Peacock.
The joke is in the first sentence and the show never once winks at it. Netflix’s series applies the entire apparatus of prestige true crime, the forensic timelines, the witness rehabilitation, the slow-motion recreations, the interrogation of reasonable doubt, to the question of who spray-painted crude drawings on twenty-seven cars in a high school parking lot. A student documentarian believes the boy expelled for it is innocent. The series treats that belief with total sincerity for eight episodes and, remarkably, earns it.
It belongs on a list like this because the parody is the investigation rather than a coat of paint on one. Every beat of the genre gets tested by being applied to something trivial, and most of them break in interesting ways. The show is genuinely good at the thing it is making fun of, which is why the second season, a lighter eight episodes about a very different crime at a Catholic school, works as well as the first. Sixteen episodes total, eight and eight, and Netflix cancelled it in 2018 despite both seasons holding 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is the youngest show here and the one that understands modern detective storytelling best, partly because it is the only one that treats the format itself as the suspect. It streams on Netflix.
The BBC One series that ran from 2006 to 2007 puts a Manchester detective inspector in front of a car in 2006 and stands him up in 1973, and then refuses for sixteen episodes to tell him or the audience what happened. Sam Tyler might have travelled in time. He might be in a coma hearing the ward around him bleed into the dream. He might be dead. The show is built so that all three readings survive every episode, and a voice on a radio or a phone that should not work keeps arriving to make it worse.
What makes it a detective show rather than a puzzle box is that the uncertainty attacks the police work directly. Sam solves cases in 1973 using methods from a future that may not exist, next to a governor who does not believe in forensics and does believe in hitting people, and every time he is right he has no way of knowing whether he was right about anything real. That is the sharpest version of the question every detective show is quietly asking, which is whether the evidence means what the detective thinks it means. Two series of eight, sixteen episodes, a complete ending, and a 100% score from 29 critics that no other entry here comes close to. It streams on Prime Video and BritBox in the United States.
None of this takes anything away from what HBO is building. Lanterns is five episodes into a story that has three more to tell, and judging a mystery before it finishes is exactly the mistake this genre punishes. What the four shows above offer is the longer view. Each of them found something the detective story could do that it had not done before, whether that was interviewing the victim, showing the murder first, taking the trivial seriously, or making the detective doubt his own century. Seventy-six episodes between them, every one of them finished, every one of them rated higher by critics than the show now carrying the torch. If Hal Jordan and John Stewart are going to spend a season in the American heartland working a murder, these are the neighbors.
