How HBO’s Watchmen is an “extrapolation” of the original graphic novel
HBO’s upcoming Watchmen show isn’t an adaptation of Alan Moore’s landmark graphic novel, but it does take place in the same world. In Moore’s world, superheroes are real and have been altering the course of human events for decades. The new show will take place roughly 30 years after the events of Alan Moore’s work, which ended with Adrian Veidt — aka the hero Ozymandias — tricking the world into thinking it was under attack by aliens so they would band together instead of teetering on the edge of nuclear war.
The series, which is set 30 years after those events, kicks off later this month. It’s an ambitious undertaking for creator Damon Lindelof (The Leftovers, Lost). Will he and his team pull it off?
Speaking at the 2019 New York Comic Con this past weekend, Lindelof explained his vision. “I have such reverence for the original material, and the idea of just doing that again was not something I necessarily wanted to see as a fan,” he said. “So I started to think about how Watchmen was written in the mid-80s and it was about the mid-80s, it was very much of its time.”
"If you were reading Watchmen when it came out, you would put it down and feel like, ‘okay, it’s an alternate history but I still feel a lot of the things that are happening in this comic book.’ So I asked myself, what happened 30 years later? What happened to Adrian Veidt after he saved the world? What was the world like after this giant squid on it? Robert Redford was running for president, so what if he won and was president for almost 30 years? I started to get captivated by those ideas."
Yes, in this world, actor Robert Redford is president. That sounds far-fetched, but we live in a world where Arnold Schwarzenegger completed two terms of the governor of California, so is it really that out there?
Also on the panel was director Nicole Kassell gushed over the source material and talked about filming episodes with crew members who were also fans.
Also on hand was director Nicole Kassell, who gushed over the source material and talked about filming episodes with crew members who were also fans. “It was amazing to have the book of images as a source of inspiration,” she said. “Damon was telling the story, the story was all set, but how could we continue to pay homage to it on every layer?”
"We would just study that book. The most exciting moments on set were when I would set a frame, and we would have fans all throughout the crew would come running over with a panel from the comic asking, ‘This is the shot?’ ‘That’s the shot.’"
Dave Gibbons, the artist on the original Watchmen graphic novel, was at NYCC as well, and is fully behind Lindelof’s project. “What particularly attracted me to this was what Damon had in mind was not a prequel or sequel, but an extrapolation,” he said. “What Alan and I did with Watchmen was we initially said, what if superheroes really existed? What would they be like, and what would the world be like? Which is quite a big question.”
"I think what Damon is asking here is the question, if that had happened back in 1986, what would the world be like now? That 30 years is a long enough time that all sorts of things can happen, and you end up a million miles away from the circumstances of the graphic novel, but still with extreme fidelity to it. There isn’t anything in this that contradicts the graphic novel. So to me it is an amplification of it, rather than a dilution."
Watchmen hits HBO on October 20.
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