HBO’s Lanterns might just be the biggest show on television right now. The DCU series created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King and based on DC Comics’ Green Lantern characters has surpassed everyone’s initial expectations with its detective drama centered around interstellar peacekeepers Hal Jordan and John Stewart (the Green Lanterns) as they investigate a murder in Rushville, Nebraska that may just have extraterrestrial ties. If you’ve been watching the series to date, you know the story takes a shocking turn with the very first episode and things only get more complex from there, delivering to fans a layered, gritty detective story that while based on comics isn’t your ordinary superhero fare. It is, without question, truly great television.
But while Lanterns is having its moment, it also has had me thinking about a very different series, one that on the surface might seem very different from Lanterns in every way imaginable. However, each week as I watch Lanterns, the more it has me thinking about a show that, while it got four seasons, three years after its cancellation feels like a big missed opportunity as a series that may have landed on the wrong network at the wrong time and actually has more in common with Lanterns than you think. That series? The CW’s Nancy Drew.
Nancy Drew had an interesting journey from books to the small screen. The third television series based on the mystery novels following the titular heroine, The CW’s series actually began development back in 2015 with CBS ordering a pilot for a series that would follow and adult Nancy rather than a teen. The network passed on the project, which sent it to NBC where it was redeveloped and it then moved again to The CW in 2018, got a pilot order, and ultimately a series order in 2019. What arrived on The CW was something a little in between a teen drama and an adult series. Following the loss of her mother, 18-year-old Nancy (Kennedy McMann) puts off applying to Columbia University and stays in her hometown, becoming entangled in the murder investigation for socialite Tiffany Hudson while also working at a local restaurant, the Claw. She and her coworkers at the Claw find themselves having to clear themselves of suspicion in Hudson’s murder and, in doing so, uncover a decades old cold case tied to an urban legend.
As the series goes on, the connections to the supernatural get deeper and deeper, as does the truth about Nancy’s own history. Things certainly get campy and definitely a little weird, and there are certainly some melodramatic elements to the series — it wouldn’t be a The CW show without them. But when you strip those things away, what you get is something that is actually really intriguing. Nancy Drew takes great pains to take its primary character and strip away the elements fans expect from her thanks to decades of novels. Television Nancy isn’t perfect, preppy, and perky. She’s flawed, messy, and has secrets of her own even on top of the secrets being kept about her that she isn’t aware of. The charming small town her story is set in isn’t so charming when you look closely. You start to pull at the corners a little and what you see isn’t so pretty anymore.
Lanterns actually takes a very similar approach. The HBO series brings the space-based heroes down to Earth, makes both Hal (Kyle Chandler) and John (Aaron Pierre) complicated, flawed, and at times unlikeable characters rather than Big Damn Heroes as we often see them in comics. Rushville isn’t some nice little small town, it’s got issues, and every corner seems to have some dark mystery waiting around it. Nancy Drew might be dealing with curses and the supernatural while Lanterns is dealing with aliens, but the general conceit is the same: take something that is typically lighter and brighter, strip it down to its parts, make it darker and more grounded, and give it a solid driving mystery to dig into. The biggest difference between Lanterns and Nancy Drew is the network. Lanterns gets to thrive in its layers and conspiracies. Nancy Drew did not.
Ultimately, Nancy Drew ended its run in 2023 after four seasons. Despite having a very devoted fanbase, the show was never particularly successful in terms of ratings and wasn’t exactly a smash with critics, either, though it’s fate was largely the result of cost and a network shift — Nexstar took over The CW and there in May 2022 made radical changes to their programming strategies that saw the elimination of most of the network’s original programming. Nancy Drew simply was too expensive and didn’t make sense under the new structure.
However, if you look at how Lanterns has managed to take similar elements and thrive, it’s not a stretch to think that another attempt at a mature, gritty Nancy Drew adaptation might do well on HBO as well. At this point, enough time has gone by that you can’t simply just pick The CW’s Nancy Drew up and keep going. Contracts have long expired, creatives and actors have moved on and the series did get something of a conclusive send off. But the concept is still a solid one. It’s worth revisiting, just on a network that has the budget and the space to allow the story to really grow the way it needs to. After all, the best parts of Nancy Drew were the parts where things got really dark and strange. Giving an adult take on a childhood classic another shot on HBO would let everyone’s favorite girl detective get truly twisted — and we’re here for it.
