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96% 408 Reviews Tomatometer 57% 5,000+ Ratings Audience Score Based on the celebrated graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, the exciting and dark "Watchmen" takes place in Tulsa, Okla.,...
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- Verdict
By Siddhant Adlakha
Updated: Aug 19, 2020 8:17 pm
Posted: Dec 30, 2019 11:20 pm
This is a spoiler-free review of Season 1 of HBO's Watchmen, which we named IGN's best TV series of the year for 2019. For our spoiler-filled reactions, check out our Watchmen finale review and ending explained. The entirety of Watchmen Season 1 is free to watch on HBO.com and on-demand from June 19-21 in observance of Juneteenth.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ landmark 1986-87 comic has seen numerous adaptations — much to the chagrin of Moore, who claims to have been swindled out of the rights by DC — from a 2009 Zack Snyder film, to a 2012 line of prequel comics, to the recently concluded Doomsday Clock, which sees the Watchmen characters interact with the likes of Batman and Superman. None came anywhere close to the original’s prowess, because none seemed to capture the lightning that was its in-your-face politics, told through a tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of the era’s superhero genre. None, that is, until HBO’s nine-part TV series from Lost and The Leftovers showrunner Damon Lindelof.
The show is distinctly of the “now,” invoking the racial politics of a fractured America, while taking place in an alternate 2019 that sprung from the events of the comic. It focuses, for the most part, on characters who feel like spiritual successors to the original Watchmen lineup, before slowly but surely roping familiar names back into its story. Though, perhaps most potently, the show delves into some of the comic’s unexplored corners as a means to explore American history — specifically, parts of history that have been swept under the rug. The first episode even opens with a depiction of the 1921 Black Wall Street Massacre, in which the KKK and other white citizens in Tulsa, Oklahoma attacked and killed dozens of wealthy black residents while injuring hundreds more. Before the show skips forward to the modern day, it draws visual parallels between the masks and robes of the Klan, and the outfits of most modern superheroes; its fuse comes pre-lit through direct, unapologetic racial imagery, even though it doesn’t always balance those instincts perfectly.
Laurie and Looking Glass get their own individual episodes (three and five respectively), which elaborate not only the current politics of this world — often messy, but always intriguing — but also on the three decades that have passed since the events of the comic, in which Ozymandias/Adrian Veidt covertly unleashed an enormous squid-like alien on New York, killing millions and psychically infecting millions more with nightmares, in order to force countries on the brink of nuclear war to finally work together. These episodes are proof Damon Lindelof was the right person for this show. They focus on broken, lonely individuals living in the aftermath of trauma — Lindelof’s M.O. — and while the final episode doesn’t do them any favours, they form a vibrant part of the series’ overall fabric.
The show’s other supporting characters are just as dynamic. Hong Chau plays Lady Trieu, an enigmatic trillionaire working on a secret clock tower and various biological experiments. Louis Gossett Jr. plays Will, a cheeky elderly man with connections to the histories of Watchmen and Tulsa, whose story subverts the Superman tale in interesting ways. Jeremy Irons plays “the Lord of the Manor,” whose identity is slowly revealed over the course of several surreal vignettes, which feel rightly disconnected from the rest of the show, but which highlight Watchmen’s Brechtian nature, drawing constant attention to genre tropes and operatic artifice.
The show can likely be enjoyed by anyone regardless of having read Watchmen, but watching it feels most rewarding when one is familiar with the comic (its ending, which the movie changes, is key to many of the show’s events and characters). Lindelof & co. draw not only from the comic’s main story, but from the historical documents between each chapter — Hollis Mason’s autobiography, magazine interviews with Adrian Veidt — in order to re-visit and even recontextualize the comic’s history, in a manner consistent with the need to un-whitewash real history and its forgotten corners. It explores the meaning behind the masked vigilante, which has existed in American fiction for over a century, and tells character-centric stories about the reasons the Western, the superhero, and other such genre staples have looked the way they have, demographically speaking.
Minor spoilers: these stories and secret histories arrive in the form of flashbacks, but they’re experienced in-the-moment by characters feeling the effects of “Nostalgia,” an aptly named pharmaceutical drug that allows people to re-live memories (their own, and, at the risk of psychosis, the memories of others). The mechanics of these scenes, which collapse past and present, mirror the comic’s ingenious “Watchmaker” chapter, in which Dr. Manhattan experiences multiple points in time simultaneously. Manhattan’s presence looms large over the proceedings, though when he finally shows up (I shan’t spoil when or how) the ensuing episode uses fascinating directing and editing techniques to place us directly in his time-slipping perspective.
But does the show equal the comic, let alone surpass it? That’s harder to say. One of the reasons the original Watchmen worked so well was its visceral, cognitively dissonant impact. It was, above all else, a piece where the worst of human nature took the form of American culture’s brightest and most revered — the comic book superhero. The show doesn’t quite allow for those same emotional or intellectual navigations, even amidst questions of power; as hidden motivations come to light, it leans towards a more simplistic moral binary than its predecessor (even though more complicated elements are built into its premise).
That being said, the show pulls off a thermodynamic miracle in finally making a Watchmen adaptation a must-see addition to its canon. It’s spiritually and logistically in line with the original, and what little it does re-write, it does so for reasons that feel thematically sound. It brings old favourites back into the fold in ways that feel justified, while introducing a new set of colourful characters with their own complications, and with inherited traumas that collide with the fabric of this alternate 2019. The show is strange and immersive, and its world feels both hauntingly lived-in, and magnetic enough that you’d want to walk through your screen and experience it for yourself. There may or may not be a second season, which is well and good, since its nine-episode story feels complete.
HBO’s Watchmen is worthy of the original graphic novel, capturing our fractured political moment in the form of a twisted superhero saga. It lacks the comic’s visceral impact, but it surpasses it in several ways, including its eye towards black history and its emotional intimacy. While it can't quite stick the landing, it also features several of t...
- Siddhant Adlakha
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