Just when things are moving slowly and we start to worry that HBO and Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen series is never going to happen, some new news materialises out of nowhere.
Today’s Watchmen development is that Nicole Kassell has officially been hired to direct and executive produce the pilot. It’s all happening now, folks. It’s finally looking like a real thing that’s going to be on real tellies.
Watchmen won’t be the first time Kassell has teamed up with HBO: she’s previously directed a couple of episodes of fantasy series The Leftovers (including ‘It’s A Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World’ and ‘No Room At The Inn’) as well as an episode of drama Vinyl. Her other TV directing credits include American Crime, The Following, The Killing, and Better Call Saul.
The Watchmen pilot ought to stay true to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ classic graphic novel, as Lindelof has been a fan since the 1980s. Speaking to CBR in 2009, he said: “From the flashbacks to the nonlinear storytelling to the deeply flawed heroes, these are all elements that I try to put into everything I write.”
In case you have somehow not read the graphic novel, Watchmen “was a serious-minded deconstruction of superhero comics loosely inspired by characters from the Charlton Comics library, which were owned by DC.
“Set in a universe in which the appearance of costumed heroes in the mid-20th Century had altered the course of history — leading to U.S. victory in Vietnam and a Nixon presidency that stretched into the mid-1980s — Watchmen followed a group of crimefighters investigating the murder of one of their own. In the process, those characters — including Doctor Manhattan, Nite Owl, Silk Spectre, and Rorschach — uncover a conspiracy with enormous implications.”
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