Damon Lindelof doesn’t know if his Watchmen show “worked”

Today at New York Comic Con, HBO is getting ready to pull the curtain back on Watchmen, its upcoming series based on Alan Moore’s seminal 1986 graphic novel about how real-world history would be different if superheroes were a part of it, and what problems those superheroes would have.

And also there are Watchmen-themed bathrooms at the con, something I’m sure the famously cantankerous Moore would just love.

Watchmen debuts on October 20, from the mind of Damon Lindelof, the guy behind LOST and The Leftovers. Only not exactly, because one thing I learned from a recent interview in Den of Geek is that Lindelof didn’t come to HBO with the idea for a Watchman show. The network approached him in 2017, as The Leftovers was wrapping up. And he’d asked to make a Watchmen show twice before, once by Warner Bros. — the people behind Zach Snyder’s 2009 movie adaptation — and again a couple years later. He said no both times. The third time was the charm. “I went off and asked myself, ‘Is there any reason that Watchmen needs to exist as a television series?’” he said. “And if it existed, as a fan, what would I want to see?”

One thing he wants is some legacy characters from the original comic, and indeed, there look to be a few floating around. Jean Smart plays a character Laurie Blake, who seems like an older version of the hero Silk Spectre. And although Lindelof refuses to confirm it, all signs point towards Jeremy Irons playing Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias.

This new show is sets years after the conclusion of the original comic, when the “hero” Ozymandias conspired to drop a giant squid monster on Manhattan, killing hundreds of thousands in an attempt to trick the nations of the Earth — then poised on the brink of nuclear war — into thinking they were under attack by space aliens and come together. “It’s a wonderful alt-history, and an exciting one,” Lindelof said. “We’d say, ‘Everything that happened in the original Watchmen through the end of ‘85, we inherited.’ That happens, we cannot aberrate from it.”

"But now we have 30 years of alt-history between ‘85 and 2019 to construct ourselves that is in conversation with all of those events that occurred. We now have the opportunity to take some risks and come up with some new ideas that are supported by the foundation designed by the original Watchmen."

In those 30 years, Robert Redford is elected president and has been in the office for decades, a nod to how Richard Nixon blasted through the two-term limit in the original comic. Technology is less widespread than it is now, and a group of masked vigilantes calling themselves the Seventh Cavalry are targeting police officers, which forces people like lead character Angela Abar (Regina King) to hide behind a mask she does her work lest she or her family be targeted.

Clearly, the show will deal with some thorny issues, and we’re just getting started. It’s set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a reference to the 1921 riot where white residents attacked black business in an event called “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history.” Basically, Lindelof thinks that the 2019 equivalent to the Cold War paranoia spotlighted in Moore’s original work is the fraught racial tensions we’re experiencing today, particularly as they relate to policing.

So the show isn’t just dealing with thorny issues; it’s basically a thorn forest. Does Lindelof worry about being a white man tackling this racially sensitive story? “All the time,” he told Deadline. “Constantly. Over and over again not just while I was incepting it but while I was making it and certainly now. You know, this is sort of like the first interview on the first hardcore full day of press, and all I think about is how I’m going to answer that question because it’s a reasonable question to ask. But I’m ready to answer it.”

"I take full responsibility for the show but the Watchmen pilot and in fact the entire season was thought out and questioned and challenged and debated vigorously and a writers’ room of 12 talented and smart individuals. I was certainly the showrunner, but it’s not just me. I’m proud to say this isn’t me talking about numbers and statistics and all that but I’ll say there were four white dudes in that room of 12. That’s important and listening to all of those smart and talented individuals was and is important."

“I hope that we made something original, something surprising, something engaging, something worthy of discourse, something dangerous, something interesting, all the adjectives that I affix to the original Watchmen,” Lindelof continued. “Most of all, it’s something original. Again, I’m not qualified to say that. I am proud of what we did but I’m also very nervous about it.”

I think I would be, too — this show sounds like it could be an insightful hit or a hot mess. At least I’m interested in watching. “I’ll be honest with you,” Lindelof told Den of Geek. “I don’t even know if it worked. There was a lot of experimentation going on and I feel like I learned a lot from making these nine episodes, but I’m not entirely sure I’m able to articulate to you what I learned.”

"The show is becoming a bit of a Rorschach test in and of itself. I don’t want to come out there and say, ‘This is what it is. And this is how I define it, and you have to define it that way.’ I want to let the audience define it the way they want to. The pilot has been constructed as an entry point for people who have no familiarity with Watchmen. But my feeling is that, as the season goes on and the episodes unfold, it should still be accessible and understandable to a new audience."

So unsettled is Watchmen that Lindelof isn’t even sure if it’ll keep going after the one season. “We designed these nine episodes to be as self-contained as the original 12 issues,” he told Deadline. “We wanted to feel like there was a sense of completeness, to resolve the essential mystery at hand. Obviously, there is a potential promise for the further exploration of the world but like the seasons of Leftovers that I did as opposed to Lost, which was designed to have cliffhanger finales and a promise of future storytelling.”

Honestly, I’m still on the fence about Watchmen, but at the least, it doesn’t sound boring. We’ll all get to find out if Lindelof’s experiment pays off when it debuts three Sundays from now.

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