New HBO series ‘Watchmen’ hopes to match original’s ambition
NEW YORK—Damon Lindelof didn’t take lightly the challenge of adapting the most acclaimed graphic novel of all time.
The “Lost” and “The Leftovers” co-creator was a fan of the revered “Watchmen” book ever since his father handed him the first few issues when he was 13 in the mid-1980s. So agreeing to spearhead HBO’s new adaptation didn’t come without a bout or two of nerves.
“There was immense trepidation and it was never overcome,” he told The Associated Press. “Trepidation is actually our greatest asset.”
Lindelof will see how he’s done when the first of his nine-episode “Watchmen” follow-up debuts Sunday and the fanboys and fangirls weigh in. They will find many things created in their honor.
“The end result is something that is hopefully accessible to people who don’t have an intimate familiarity with ‘Watchmen,’ but there’s constant love letters and acknowledgments that we are building upon the foundation of this masterpiece,” said Lindelof.
The creators have managed to lure an eclectic list of actors, including Regina King, Jeremy Irons, Louis Gossett Jr., Jean Smart, Tim Blake Nelson and Don Johnson. It proved a formidable task to build on writer Alan Moore’s and illustrator Dave Gibbons’ dark superhero tale, which follows a group of masked vigilantes who uncover a vast conspiracy after one of their own is killed in an alternate-history America. Superheroes are banned and have gone underground.
Before they wrote a line of script for the new series, Lindelof and his team of 12 writers carefully plotted over 10 weeks what happened to that alternate world in the decades until 2019. “It’s a history that’s just adjacent to our own with some significant major aberrations,” he said.
The main plot is set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where it’s hard to tell the bad guys from the good guys because police also wear masks. Some of the original characters have made the leap 30 years and some are brand-new. The internet isn’t a thing in this version of 2019 — newspapers and radio are the main means of mass communication.
The original “Watchmen” was built around the dread of the Cold War and so the creators of the HBO series also looked for a unifying theme. While they worked, the culture was wracked by images of white nationalists rallying in Charlottesville, Virginia, and black men being shot by police.
As a result, the new series paints a bleak portrait of race relations in America, with well-intentioned good guys fighting an endless wave of white supremacy. Its carefully crafted scripts explore vigilantism, torture and even eugenics. “It had to be bold and it had to take risks and it had to be surprising and it had to be a little bit unsafe,” Lindelof said.
“And so if we were feeling unsafe writing it, that was sort of an essential emotional component of the storytelling.”
It’s a challenging work and complex to watch. No wonder adapting “Watchmen” well has long eluded Hollywood. But Lindelof and his team have avoided one pitfall of director Zack Snyder’s “Watchmen” movie of a decade ago—being too reverential to the source material. This new series isn’t scared by its legacy.
“There is something almost freeing about saying, ‘This is supposed to be impossible. If we attempt this dive and we end up breaking our neck or, halfway down, we realize there’s no water in the pool, that’s sort of what everybody expected from us anyway,’” he said. “That became liberating.” / S