Why Lanterns Is Set in Rushville, Nebraska — and the Personal Story Behind It

Lanterns could have sent Hal Jordan and John Stewart almost anywhere.

Instead, HBO’s Green Lantern series drops two intergalactic space cops into Rushville, Nebraska — a tiny Midwestern town that feels about as far removed from the cosmic side of the DC Universe as possible.

But after the premiere, we know Rushville isn’t just the setting for their latest case.

It’s where Hal Jordan’s Green Lantern story began.

Rushville Is Where Abin Sur Crash-Landed

During the Lanterns premiere, Hal tells John about how he became a Green Lantern.

A few years into his career as an Air Force test pilot, Hal was pulled out of bed and sent to Rushville after an alien spacecraft crashed there.

That alien was Abin Sur.

Abin Sur’s death ultimately led to Hal receiving the power ring and becoming Earth’s Green Lantern — meaning Lanterns has relocated one of the most important moments in Hal Jordan’s mythology to the same tiny Nebraska town at the center of the series’ present-day mystery.

And that makes the creative team’s decision to use Rushville considerably more interesting.

Because the town wasn’t simply selected as a convenient backdrop for a grounded detective story.

For showrunner Chris Mundy and co-writer/executive producer Tom King, Nebraska served a very specific storytelling purpose.

For King, Rushville itself was personal.

Green Lantern Powers Hit Different in Nebraska

For Mundy, grounding Lanterns meant resisting the urge to immediately throw everything Green Lantern can do at the audience.

The show starts smaller.

First, viewers get John. Then Hal and John’s relationship. Then Rushville itself. Even their rings are introduced through surprisingly mundane uses before the scale starts increasing.

Hal uses a construct to make a $20 bill play a song over and over again. John uses the ring to light a cigarette. There’s a bottle opener.

They’re Green Lantern constructs, but they’re being treated like things these guys would casually use while going about their lives.

Mundy said the idea was to make audiences accept these two as actual people first — people who just happen to have the extremely strange job of being space cops.

Then the show can start layering in more.

That same philosophy applies to Nebraska.

Rushville feels dusty, tangible and aggressively Earthbound. Put something impossible in the middle of that, and suddenly the impossible matters.

King said superhero powers can eventually become “noise on top of noise” when everything surrounding them is already enormous.

Without something ordinary to compare them against, there’s no sense of scale.

He compared the idea to Lawrence of Arabia: the enormity of the desert becomes clearer when there’s one person moving through it.

That’s what Nebraska does for Lanterns.

By building a world that feels small and real first, a Green Lantern construct doesn’t disappear into another giant superhero spectacle.

It sticks out.

King said they wanted the powers to “explode” against that reality, comparing the effect to the way dragons stand out in Game of Thrones.

“That was the idea of putting it in Nebraska, a place where they would really stand out,” King said.

And Nebraska wasn’t picked out of a hat, either.

Mundy is from the state himself.

But the reason the show landed specifically in Rushville came from King.

Rushville Comes From Tom King’s Grandmother

King grew up in Los Angeles, but his grandmother came from Rushville, a small town in Nebraska’s Panhandle near the South Dakota border.

Raised by a single mother, King said his grandmother played a major role in his childhood and would tell him stories about where she grew up.

To a kid from Los Angeles, those stories sounded almost impossible.

She told him about riding a horse to school. About a schoolhouse with only a handful of children. About living somewhere where everyone knew everyone else.

For King, Rushville might as well have been another planet.

And once you put it that way, using it for a Green Lantern story makes a strange amount of sense.

When the creative team began thinking about their characters traveling somewhere that would feel almost alien to them, King thought back to Rushville.

Only this time, the alien world isn’t somewhere across the universe.

It’s Nebraska.

There was another reason, too.

King said his grandmother was a wonderful person, and using Rushville allowed him to put “a little bit of her magic in the show.”

That’s where Rushville came from.

And because of the mythology Lanterns has now built around the town, that personal tribute has become something considerably bigger.

Tom King’s grandmother’s hometown is now the place where Abin Sur fell to Earth — and where Hal Jordan’s life as a Green Lantern began.

The Smallest Place Makes the Universe Feel Bigger

That choice gets at what Lanterns is trying to do differently.

Hal Jordan and John Stewart still have rings capable of creating almost anything they can imagine. They’re still members of an intergalactic police force. The cosmic side of Green Lantern hasn’t disappeared.

The show just doesn’t begin there.

It begins with two men.

A murder investigation.

A small Nebraska town.

And a place from Tom King’s childhood that once felt like an alien world.

Except now Rushville has become something else, too.

It’s where an alien actually fell from the sky.

It’s where Hal Jordan’s story began.

And it’s where Lanterns has brought him back.