Watchmen, written by Alan Moore, is quite likely the greatest story ever written for comicbook format. It started when DC Comics obtained the rights to use old characters from the Charlton Comics company (including Steve Ditko’s The Question) and then hired Moore to write for those characters. When Moore proposed a murder mystery where at least one of DC’s new characters got killed, his editor proposed that he make slightly altered versions of those characters in a new setting- which had no continuity with the universe of Superman and Batman. The result was both very adult and very philosophical, in which Steve Ditko’s Objectivism was transmuted into Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism: in an apparently random universe, the only thing that gives life meaning is the responsibility of making a moral choice. Even if that means putting on a mask to fight crime.
The thing is, Moore and artist Dave Gibbons also wrote Watchmen on the condition that the rights would revert back to them once the comic series was no longer in publication – which given its success, means never. So Moore was so pissed he now refuses to let his name be associated with any of the work he did for DC- even though the Watchmen characters he made were themselves based on someone else’s material. In any event DC continues to exploit its intellectual property for all it’s worth, such as Zach Snyder’s semi-successful adaptation of the Watchmen story, a recent comic book crossover where Moore’s universe was in fact merged with the DC Universe, and now this TV series by Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers).
Given that the comic was a complex limited series with 12 issues, with sex, profanity and a FUCKTON of violence, a lot of us thought that a Watchmen adaptation should have been a limited series on HBO in the first place. But since the story was already done by Snyder, DC actually decided not to reboot something they’d done only a few years before (like Batman) and instead went in a totally new direction.
Whereas the original story was set in the 1980s, the Watchmen series goes into 2019, meaning that Lindelof’s story is set in the same universe, over 30 years after the events of the comic. What makes this piece interesting and valid is that it takes the background universe and uses it to present a setting that actually has some relevance to the current situation. For instance: Latter-day critics of Moore’s Watchmen point out that despite the series being set in 1980s New York, there were no black characters among the principals. (In that respect, it was sort of like Friends, if Friends was a R-rated drama about murderous vigilantes.) This series is set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a multiracial police force and a cast of characters centered around Regina King, who plays a police operative called “Sister Night.” Now, why cops have to have secret identities and costumes is a background element that isn’t immediately explained in the pilot, nor is the connection between King’s character and the bloody massacre of Tulsa’s black community by racists in 1921. Presumably this is the sort of thing that gets drawn out and explained over the course of the series, in the same way that the comicbook drew the reader in by gradually explaining details, like how Nixon became president-for-life partially because another superhero won the war in Vietnam.
So given that the story starts in progress (as it did during the comic) it really isn’t necessary to have read Moore’s Watchmen to see this series, although the tie-ins are important for anyone who has. In the comic, the vigilante Rorschach left his journal with a right-wing publisher, hoping to expose the main plot of the story after he was killed. Well, in the ensuing period, his journal apparently became the inspiration for a masked racist goon squad called The Seventh Kavalry who seem to be the main bad guys of this series. (Historically, the 7th Cavalry was the unit under General Custer that got trashed at Little Big Horn.) And this was one of the things I didn’t like about the TV pilot. Rorschach in the comic might have been a right-winger with a LOT of issues (namely misogyny) but he never seemed actively racist. Now again, that might be because the main characters weren’t interacting with black people much at all. But given how many heroes in this setting (especially from the World War II generation) had racist opinions, Rorschach didn’t seem like that type. Given his other positions though, he didn’t seem like he was directly opposed to racism, which may be the point. This wouldn’t be the first time that racist goons took the writings of some dead person and interpreted them to support their position whether it fit or not.
In this respect, the other thing that distinguishes Lindelof’s project from the comic is that this world seems to be the mirror image of liberal fears of conservative dominance and the ultimate expression of the conservative paranoia that drives them to seek dominance. Since Nixon died, Robert Redford has been president for over 30 years, racial reparation is called “Redfordations” and gun control is so strict that cops have to go through bureaucratic procedure just to access their pistols in the field.
The one bit of this production that rings false is the median scenes featuring Jeremy Irons as “Lord of a Country Estate.” Because if he is supposed to be Adrian Veidt, the script does him even more of a disservice than it does Rorschach. It’s always fun to watch Jeremy Irons chew the scenery, but his character actually is a Republic Serial villain. In the comic, Veidt would freely kill people as a means to an end, but not as gleefully as Irons does. Plus, Veidt was supposed to be an American of German background. Producers have so far cast him as a decadent Eurotrash played by Matthew Goode and now Irons. Whereas the original dialogue and artwork conveyed more a plain-spoken American type. If anything, the elderly Veidt should have been played by Robert Redford himself, or maybe Brad Pitt.
But if nothing else, you can say that Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen is timely (so to speak). So far, I’d say this is like a couple of other bastard progeny of Alan Moore’s DC Comics work: The Sean Connery version of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LXG) and the Constantine movie starring Keanu Reeves. If you went into them assuming they had anything to do with the source material other than the starting premise, it would only make your head hurt. But if you looked at them as their own things, they were surprisingly entertaining. I think of Watchmen the same way, and who knows, it might actually have something to say at the end of it.