HBO tried to get a TV series based on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ classic graphic novel Watchmen going back in 2014, and now they’re gearing up for another go.
Variety reports that Damon Lindelof (Lost, Prometheus, The Leftovers) has been brought on board to tackle the weighty source material, but there’s currently no word on what form it would take. DC has been doing a lot with the characters and the world over the last few years, but would HBO want to follow that route or produce a limited series sticking closely to the book?
In a lot of ways, that latter adaptation has already been done with Zack Snyder’s 2009 film, which was so laboriously faithful for the most part that it was actually a shock when it changed anything.
Lindelof, meanwhile, has just finished his work on the brilliant HBO series The Leftovers. His take on Watchmen will be entirely independent of HBO’s previous attempts.
In case you have somehow not read the graphic novel (go and read it, now!), 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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