Damon Lindelof's Watchmen

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?

he's ahead of jj abrams there

don’t get me started

Abrams has often spoken of the inspiration he took from Aristotle's Lensflarica.

A rave review! (It is not a rave review.)

https://io9.gizmodo.com/hbos-watchmen-wants-to-dig-into-the-heart-of-american-r-1838914665

That sure was a lot of words for "it's a pilot, we'll see what happens"

lol how is it you are u still in the tank for this bullshit

you mean how am I optimistic about a show almost no one's seen by creatives whose last show was one of the best ever?

did you really just use the word "creatives"

Sounds like it doesn’t have much to do with the comic.

I'm going to need a few more episodes reviewed before I even think about watching "masked cops but woke"

genuinely wondering why this is a WATCHMEN series when it seems to have no need to be, other than getting viewers

will not watch, in any case, it's all so grubby

did you really just use the word "creatives"

too much time spent on the screenwriting discord

Would he have preferred “showrunners”? Lol

Crap artists

luv 2 show my inherent respect to "creatives" by stanning for a Watchmen TV show

assuming it has an above-average chance of being good based on immediately preceding work is "stanning" now, cool

most pre-release reviews of shows are based on 3-4 eps minimum, I'm assuming the trades will have something to say soon

apologies:

luv 2 show my inherent respect to "creatives" by endorsing scabbing over and over and over

if it makes you feel any better I'll be pirating it

https://images.amcnetworks.com/amc.com/wp-content/uploads/mt-legacy/scifi-scanner/w-i5-p9-06.jpg

What about all the awful non-immediately preceding work

Though the events of the original Watchmen comics play a significant role in the shaping of the series’ world—a place where the internet and cell phones don’t exist

lol when are writers going to stop finding ways to write themselves out of the corners that the modern world has painted them into and actually start creatively engaging with them

Watchmen (at least in its first episode) frames white terrorists and cops as being diametrically-opposed groups that have no ideological overlap.

speaking of problematic writing: holy shit

lol when are writers going to stop finding ways to write themselves out of the corners that the modern world has painted them into and actually start creatively engaging with them

just because Lindelof sucks doesn’t mean that ppl who are not Lindelof didn’t write Open Windows and Cellular and Content and Sherlock and Stuber and Broad City and Years & Years and Cyberbully and Mosaic and

sorry, i don't watch anything that's not comic-book-related

I thought we already had the "writing the world as it isn't to evoke something about the world as it is" discussion on the OUATIH thread

(of course that doesn't make every alternate earth a good or sound idea)

Based on how I feel about Watchmen, almost thirty years after I first read it, I am... intrigued but not that interested by this.

But based on how I feel about all three seasons of the Leftovers, I am ****super excited****

.. and If I'd only watched Lost and Prometheus, I'd be claw sharpening. But The Leftovers is so good, guys.

The only valid excuse for technological anachronisms in fiction is steampunk.

Wait, is this steampunk, if so then steamsign me up