Cyrus Reed: Hey, how was the rest of your week — did you end up watching anything or did it just evaporate?
Iris Holm: Evaporated. Entirely. You?
Cyrus Reed: Same, but — okay, so something has been stuck in my head and it's been bothering me since I went down this rabbit hole a few days ago. It's about a TV show that was finished. Like, actually finished. Scripts written, cast locked, director attached — and then just... not made. Seth Grahame-Smith completed scripts for all eight episodes of the HBO Max Green Lantern series in October 2022, and by that same month, he was gone from the project.
Iris Holm: Wait — all eight scripts?
Cyrus Reed: All eight. Done. Not a pitch bible, not a treatment — actual episode scripts. And I keep thinking about what that even means, because this isn't a show that collapsed in development, it's more like... imagine finishing a novel, every word, and the publisher shreds it before it prints. That's the thing that doesn't add up.
Iris Holm: And Greg Berlanti's team had been building this since 2019.
Cyrus Reed: Since 2019, yeah — so we're talking three years of development, Finn Wittrock cast as Guy Gardner, Jeremy Irvine as Alan Scott, Lee Toland Krieger attached to direct the first two episodes, and they'd even created a completely original character — Bree Jarta, a half-alien Green Lantern — who existed nowhere in the comics, built just for this show. And then, nothing.
Iris Holm: That's the part that interests me. Bree Jarta never even got cast.
Cyrus Reed: Right, and that's actually where the structure gets weird — because Bree Jarta not existing yet is almost the point? Like, the show wasn't just adapting Green Lantern mythology, it was... wait, okay, the architecture here is genuinely strange for superhero TV. They split the whole narrative across two timelines — 1941 following Alan Scott, the original Golden Age Lantern, and then 1984 following Guy Gardner.
Iris Holm: Two separate historical eras. One season.
Cyrus Reed: One season, yeah — which is not how any superhero show does it. And the 1984 thread isn't just 'Guy Gardner fights aliens.' Production materials apparently described him as — no, this is the actual framing — a hulking mass of masculinity. Like, a deliberate embodiment of 1980s hyper-patriotism. That's ideological. That's a choice with a specific argument inside it.
Iris Holm: Finn Wittrock playing Reagan-era aggression as a superhero premise.
Cyrus Reed: Exactly — and then the 1941 storyline is doing something completely different tonally with Alan Scott and Jeremy Irvine. Plus you've got Jessica Cruz, Simon Baz, Kilowig, Sinestro in the ensemble. So this isn't two leads — it's... a multigenerational thing, and they're running it simultaneously.
Iris Holm: That's the structural gamble. Now — they started at ten episodes, trimmed to eight. Does the cut hurt the multigenerational format specifically?
Cyrus Reed: Huh — I mean, that's the thing I can't fully answer, because sourcing gets thin there. But trimming any dual-timeline structure... you're cutting connective tissue, right? Like, the 1941 thread and the 1984 thread presumably rhymed at some point, and two fewer episodes shrinks how much that pays off.
Iris Holm: So the format needed scope to justify itself.
Cyrus Reed: And that's what makes the cancellation so strange — because they didn't kill an underdeveloped idea. They killed a finished, structurally ambitious, ideologically specific thing that no other superhero show was actually doing.
Iris Holm: But the ambition is actually beside the point. Because Gunn and Safran arrive as co-heads of DC Studios in 2022 and the creative case for this show becomes irrelevant the moment they walk in.
Cyrus Reed: Wait — but is that unfair, though? Like, don't new regimes get to make their own projects? That's... I mean, that's just how studios work.
Iris Holm: They had the right. That's not the question. The question is whether we should call it a creative decision when it wasn't one.
Cyrus Reed: Okay — okay, so what actually happened, sequentially: October 2022, Grahame-Smith is out. The show pivots away from Gardner and Scott — away from the dual-timeline structure entirely — toward a John Stewart-centered narrative. And then, wait, Finn Wittrock and Jeremy Irvine both leave. That's your cast, gone. And then January 2023, HBO Max makes it official — the Berlanti series is canceled.
Iris Holm: Three months between Grahame-Smith leaving and the official announcement. That's not deliberation — that's paperwork.
Cyrus Reed: And what replaces it is — so Lanterns, developed by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King, for HBO. Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan, John Stewart as co-lead, and they're investigating murders in rural Nebraska. Which is so contained compared to what this was.
Iris Holm: Two leads. One timeline. A prestige-drama box. That's not a replacement — that's a correction to something Gunn and Safran decided was overscaled.
Cyrus Reed: But completed scripts, a locked cast, Lee Toland Krieger attached to direct — none of it was protection. That's the IP-development-during-corporate-transition thing in its purest form. You can finish the work and still lose.
Iris Holm: And — this is the part that gets stranger — Marc Guggenheim releases concept art in October 2026 on Substack. What that transparency actually means for who this show was and who controls its memory, we should get into that.
Cyrus Reed: And that's the thing that won't leave me — because picture this: you're scrolling Guggenheim's Substack on some random afternoon in October 2026, and there's Bree Jarta. Character design. Full costume. An original half-alien Green Lantern who exists nowhere in comics, built from scratch for this show, and she will never — she's never going to speak a line. She's just... a still image, and that's all she ever gets to be.
Iris Holm: Three years after cancellation.
Cyrus Reed: Three years. And wait — is this creative archaeology, or is it something else? Because the audience evaluating those designs now can't judge them on merit. The costumes will never move. The ensemble will never interact. It's — I mean, it's almost unfair to the work itself, actually. You're seeing it frozen.
Iris Holm: Which implicitly argues the show was off the ground. That's the function the release serves.
Cyrus Reed: Right — but does Guggenheim control that argument, or does the release just... happen to make it? Because I genuinely don't know if he was finally allowed to share this, or if nobody at DC Studios cares enough anymore to stop him. Those are completely different situations.
Iris Holm: We don't know his motivation. That's the honest answer.
Cyrus Reed: No, we really don't. But the pilot opening sequence was in there too — actual planned staging — and that's not just character art, that's directorial intent. Lee Toland Krieger was attached to direct those first two episodes. So what Guggenheim published is evidence that this thing had a visual grammar worked out. That's the volume-of-completed-work argument made visible.
Iris Holm: And it lands after Gunn and Safran's regime is already dug in. Lanterns exists. The window to reverse anything is closed. So the release can't threaten them — it can only mourn.
Cyrus Reed: Which is — okay, that's actually a little devastating? Because the only public window into what this show would have looked like gets opened at a moment when it genuinely cannot matter to any decision. The concept art isn't a case being made. It's just... what's left.
Iris Holm: Eight finished scripts. Finn Wittrock as Guy Gardner — never put on the ring. Jeremy Irvine as Alan Scott in 1941 — never shot a frame. That's the shape of what's left.
Cyrus Reed: And somewhere there's concept art of Bree Jarta — a character someone invented from nothing, built her whole, gave her a costume and a visual grammar — and she belongs to a show that no longer exists. She never existed anywhere else. That's... I mean, that's a strange kind of disappearance.
Iris Holm: Lanterns is being made. The other show isn't. That's the whole sentence.
