Damon Lindelof's Watchmen

There is a vast and insidious conspiracy at play. #WatchmenHBO. October. pic.twitter.com/eI0fJZB0wY

— Watchmen (@watchmen) July 20, 2019

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Looks like it's going to make a diverse group of people mad!

Not watching this trailer, leftovers was fucking great but I have a bad feeling about this somehow

Looks fun!

Looks more like a basic cheezy TV show than I was hoping/expecting it to be :/

the Hooded Justice show-within-a-show and "you curse too much" suggest they really are going to lean on the comment-on-the-medium aspect

Y'all's glowing words of praise for The Leftovers have persuaded me to give it a go at some point despite my Lindelof enmity, but this one looks like a hard pass.

it might help to see it as a Lindelof-Tom Perotta joint since the latter did have a significant role in helping to craft it. Which is why I'll be curious to see who turns up in the writing credits for this one.

lmao if Robert Redford actually shows up in this as President Robert Redford

ah yes, everyone knows the punks were like "fuck you" and then adapted a creator's work against their wishes on behalf of a couple of corporations pic.twitter.com/2s4lotaCDc

— Christopher Sebela (@xtop) July 25, 2019

Corporates, "Creatives". Gotta love 'em. Yeesh.

ah yes, the classic punk rock spirit of telling someone whose work has been stolen and ruthlessly exploited by a giant multinational to go fuck themselves

and then making millions for yourself off further exploiting that work

Will this show deliver squid-wise y/n

it takes place post-squid, so i doubt it

What with it being Lindelof I can imagine both flashbacks to it or its immediate aftermath, similar to the Vietnam flashbacks in the film - and teasing more squid a couple of times throughout the season but their emergence depending on whether this show can get a few seasons in. And in the end the squid are actually guardians to the characters entry to the afterlife.

look all i want is for doctor manhattan to fuck the squid

Lmao he is such a fuckin dork

naw doctor manhattan is cool imo

Alan Moore really needs to get his magikal curse shit together asap

"I adapted it 35 minutes ago."

— andrew bailey (@scopperil) July 25, 2019

I'm hard-pressed to think of a more sincere expression of admiration for a creator's genius and spirit than directing a hearty spray of piss into said creator's face.

my utmost respect for your work, let me show it to you
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjIyNjMzMzQ4N15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODIxNjI5NA@@._V1_.jpg

Thread just made me look up the plot of “Misery” on Wikipedia for some reason

Redford now confirmed

Hollywood legend and Captain America: Winter Soldier villain Robert Redford will have to put off that retirement party for a little longer: he will play U.S. President Robert Redford in HBO's upcoming Watchmen TV series. No, not Ronald Reagan: Robert Redford. As was teased in the final issue of the original Watchmen comic book (and reinforced in Doomsday Clock), Robert Redford is president of the United States, and has been since the 1990s. As in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's comic book series, Richard Nixon saw to it that term limits were abolished around the same time he had Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein assassinated, ensuring that he would not be forced to step down during Watergate.

https://comicbook.com/dc/2019/07/26/robert-redford-to-play-president-robert-redford-in-hbos-watchmen/

Wait, is this series supposed to exist in the same canon as “Doomsday Clock”?

I'm not a comics guy but isn't that the same canon/universe as Watchmen itself?

AFAICT they're borrowing a character/concept or two from Clock but not much else

Cool -- yeah, seems it would be weird if this series were somehow awkwardly mashed into the current incarnation of the mainstream DC Universe (the way Watchmen itself has been, via Doomsday Clock). I figured it branched off from Watchmen as its own separate thing, like the standalone movies or w/e.

Also (to lay my cards on the table), I have absolutely no clue what constitutes "canon" in the DCU at this point.

I'm not a comics guy but isn't that the same canon/universe as Watchmen itself?

Watchmen itself is a self-contained novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Everything else published by DC is theft, decades after the fact.

Also (to lay my cards on the table), I have absolutely no clue what constitutes "canon" in the DCU at this point.

― the last Berry La Croix in the work fridge (morrisp), Friday, July 26, 2019 4:07 PM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

You and everyone else up to and including the good people at DC who get paid handsomely to keep track of these things.

Oh, Lindelofpaws https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/hbo-watchmen-racism-alternate-history/

First off, Watchmen resists a traditional view of dystopian/utopian futures. In some regards, this world is “better” than our own, particularly how its version of America dealt with anti-Black racism in the 20th century. Its timeline diverged significantly after the Tulsa Race Riot in 1921, when mobs of white vigilantes attacked Black residents and firebombed the neighborhood known as “Black Wall Street” in Oklahoma, killing hundreds of people and leaving approximately 10,000 homeless. It’s a horrifying event in American history, but it’s so poorly taught (and arguably erased from the mainstream historical narrative) that Lindelof’s EW interviewer hadn’t even heard of it until he read the script for Watchmen’s pilot episode.

The pilot reportedly begins with a depiction of the massacre, which Lindelof characterizes as an educational moment: “A delivery mechanism for this piece of erased history felt right as long as it was presented in a non-exploitative way.” But in the Watchmen timeline, the U.S. authorities reacted very differently to these events, as Lindelof said:

“There’s also this legislation that’s passed, Victims OF Racial Violence Legislation, which is a form of reparations that are colloquially known as “Redford-ations.” It’s a lifetime tax exemption for victims of, and the direct descendants of, designated areas of racial injustice throughout America’s history, the most important of which, as it relates to our show, is the Tulsa massacre of 1921. That legislation had a ripple effect into another piece of legalization, DoPA, the Defense of Police Act, which allows police to hide their face behind masks because they were being targeted by terrorist organizations for protecting the victims of the initial act.”

This is a lot to unpack, but it already seems destined to be highly controversial with regards to real-life racism and police brutality.

On a structural level, Watchmen’s U.S. government was more proactive about institutional racism in the 20th century. So much so that (white) police were “targeted” for protecting Black citizens, implicitly positioning cops as the secondhand victims of racist violence.

oh god there's gonna be so many thinkpieces about this fucking show

It's like he heard about D&D's planned Confederacy show and said "Hold my beer."

'blue lives matter but also woke' was not a place i expected this to go

Can't alienate the good people on both sides!

lmao this seems precisely calculated to make literally everyone on earth mad

just to state the obvious, police have never been in the habit of helping minority victims of violence.

ahhhh but this is an alternate reality do u see

you truly can take any existing work of fiction and shoehorn in the interesting experiments in history and ethics you've been brainstorming, no matter how awkward the fit

Oh, Lindelofpaws

Imagine knowing everything DC had done to steal this from Moore over & over across three decades, and everything Snyder had said about Moore watching in his “flat” in “London,” and Moore’s reaction, and Moore’s politics, then writing this and thinking “this is IT. I’ve really cracked the nut,” and phoning Moore to tell him about it & invite him onto the writing staff. What a vast, magnificently unselfaware amount of confidence to float through life with.

I would expect nothing less from the brain behind the script for Prometheus.

Looked him up to see if anything he's done bar the first ep of Lost has entered my eyeballs, and his comic-book adaptation ethics are consistently ratshit: he's also credited on the Cowboys Vs Aliens movie.

and yet, The Leftovers

https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/watchmen-hbo-nycc-damon-lindelof-alan-moore-graphic-novel-1203360041/

“The thing that makes the original perfect was those 12 issues were designed and well-thought out,” he continued. “And it was very clear that there was a beginning, middle, and end in mind. There may have been a little bit of play in terms of the route, but they knew exactly what they were doing. We knew we had to do the same. So we plotted out these episodes. We knew exactly where we were headed. And every mystery, every question that we were asking had to be resolved.”

lmao

There's nothing quite like creating a supplement to a work your readily admit is complete unto itself. Hats off to ya, Damon.

Truly the secret of creating a great work is having a beginning, a middle and an end

feel like I heard that somewhere... Aristotle innit?