A Watchmen TV Series Has Been Announced; Is This Good Or Bad News?

Recently HBO announced they will be making Watchmen with Damon Lindelof (The Leftovers, Lost, Prometheus) as the showrunner. I am definitely interested in watching a Watchmen TV series and HBO is the right place for it. I am keen to see how it will pan out and who they will cast, nevertheless, I do have my reservations.

Zack Snyder gets a lot of hate these days due to Man Of Steel and Batman v. Superman, but personally, I think he gets more hate than he deserves. Everyone is quick to crucify the man, but none seem to acknowledge that the one DCEU movie everyone seems to absolutely love is Wonder Woman… which also happens to be the only film that Zack Snyder co-wrote.

So, love him or hate him, Snyder is a solid director, especially visually, and one of my favorite comic book movies to date is his 2009 effort Watchmen. Sure it has its issues, the main one being that it is a twelve part comic crammed into just under 3 hours. It is dense, there is no doubt about it. I remember seeing Watchmen with friends and I left the cinema saying “Oh my god, that was so great”, my friends looked at each other baffled and said “What the hell are you talking about? We have no idea what just happened”. It was at this moment I realised that having read the comic may have helped significantly.I re-watched the film, but tried to watch it as if I had not read the comics; the conclusion I came to is that it really isn’t a dumb downed film. If for one second you are not paying attention to the dialogue, story and visual narratives that are littered throughout, you can and will get lost as a first time viewer.

Watchmen was the comic everyone said would be impossible to turn into a film, due to how nuanced and complex it is. The way Alan Moore wrote and formatted it was very different to other comics at the time. For instance, it has excerpts from fictional books that exist within the universe, and these excerpts add depth and dimensions to the story and characters. In a graphic novel they work fine, but how do you translate that into a movie? Snyder actually got as close as he could to the source material, it truly is an impressive film.

The cast in the film were all brilliant, it’s hard to imagine another actor filling the shoes of The Comedian better than Jeffrey Dean Morgan, he breathed so much life into that character, he sounded as I’d imagine Eddie Blake to sound and he looked bang on. I’ll be keeping my eyes open for who they cast, if they decide to cast Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Comedian again, I’m sold.So how do I feel about HBO making a TV series from this groundbreaking graphic novel and pretty decent film? As said, I am curious. Watchmen is definitely one that deserves to be a fleshed out into a TV series. While I do love the films iconic opening title sequence set to Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A Changin’, I would really enjoy seeing the whole ‘Minutemen’ part of the story fully realized beyond that 6-minute opener.

Do I have concerns? Absolutely. HBO is a great place for something as violent and heavy as Watchmen, but the comic is only 12 chapters long, so you could squeeze a solid 13 or 14 episodes from the comic, one season at best. I can’t imagine that HBO will make just one season though, I don’t think there is any scenario where I can imagine an HBO executive saying “You know what, let us keep this to one season, let’s make this about creative integrity a priority before money”. That’s just not something that would happen; it’s more likely that HBO will drag this out longer than they should.

If it does go for too long, I could imagine the fifth season getting so far from the source material that it becomes a sitcom, like a really dark, messed up version of The Odd Couple that involves Rorschach and Nite Owl sharing an apartment together and they just can’t agree on anything. Let us all hope that it does not get even remotely close to that!I’m open to change, and I am keen to see what they do. If it doesn’t work out I promise not to freak out and lose my shit because it’s not the end of the world. I actually don’t mind remakes, reinterpretations, and adaptations. If they suck, well at least we always have the originals; if they’re awesome, they live on and will be remembered like other awesome remakes such as Scarface, Cape Fear, The Manchurian Candidate and let’s not forget Dawn Of The Dead.


Watchmen fans what do you think? Excited to get another adaptation? Sound off in the comments below, or on our Facebook page!

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