Watchmen, s1 (2019)

I feel dutybound to note that this latest take on the Watchmen comic book franchise continues to screw an original creator, writer Alan Moore, who was promised in the mid-'80s that the rights to it would revert to him when it went out of print. But it turned out to be too successful and never went out of print. DC Comics, honoring the letter rather than the spirit of the agreement, licensed it first about 10 years ago (against Moore's wishes) to a bloated film project headed by director Zack Snyder, who predictably took it way over the top. And DC remains free now to license it again to Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers) for this HBO production. Lindelof has obviously been given free range to do whatever he likes with it. Alan Moore has nothing to say and has already washed his hands of it, though his collaborator, illustrator Dave Gibbons, is involved as a producer and consultant. It's no adaptation but starts its first formal season much closer to fan fiction, riffing on the fundamentals and concepts of the original. I'm OK with that in theory because Lindelof brings a lot of obvious affection and some interesting ideas to it, plus he's established as a certain level of TV savant who can do this kind of story. I worry he is in over his head with the heavy racial themes. He has recast at least this first season as a racial drama set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, rooting the story in the historical events of the 1921 Black Wall Street Massacre, nearly a century ago, one of the most violent race riots in US history and an incident still largely whitewashed from general knowledge. I'm worried it will turn out to be more woke puzzle-box than insightful but we'll see. In a general way I was convinced by these episodes when not distracted by sympathies for Moore. It's decades after the original story, more or less in the present time, and, while lots of familiar characters, heroes, and ideas from the graphic novel show up like so much flotsam and easter egg debris, this first season seems to be mainly about rules of the road. The big kahuna as usual remains Dr. Manhattan, the only figure in the whole thing with actual superpowers, who has a strange fate that will obviously play large in the next season and probably across the whole thing. This Watchmen also has a lot of preoccupations with masks and police abuse—police in certain regions (such as Oklahoma) wear masks "for their protection," which seems metaphorically strained to me in the same way that firemen in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 burn books instead of putting out fires. I'm not convinced the arguments in Lindelof's Watchmen for policemen wearing masks make any sense at all or are particularly believable, but they work the point by brute force of how scary it looks actually in operation. With the race themes alone, this Watchmen clearly intends to make itself relevant to present political currents, nor is it oblivious to Donald Trump and Trumpism. Lindelof is capable of good TV and the show could find some good places to go for the next several years or whatever he has in mind. I appreciate some of the high points here—some neat plot twists and a bunch of good performances—but I suspect it's fatally misconceived as a TV series. And, for the record, come what may, I still think Alan Moore deserves better.