I’ve been writing about TV on this site for about three years now. I’ve gotten paid to watch a lot of good TV and some pretty bad TV as well. Sometimes, like the final episodes of Game of Thrones or the “Cult” season of American Horror Story, it felt like a miserable day at the office. Fortunately, there were always shows that made up for those days, like Better Call Saul or The Mandalorian. Not even the best episodes of those shows even came close to the experience of seeing HBO’s Watchmen for the first time. It is my favorite show I’ve ever written about. It might be my favorite show period. I’d like nothing more than to erase my memory of the past few months so I could go back and watch it for the first time again. So naturally, when HBO announced they wouldn’t be making any more episodes of their acclaimed new series, I was deeply relieved.
Calling it quits on Watchmen after one season was absolutely the right move. Damon Lindelof and his team of writers had done it. They had told the best possible story anyone could tell after the events of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ comic. And it was a complete one. In just 9 episodes, they brought a twisty, political, time-hopping superhero story to a satisfying conclusion. Watchmen was everything I didn’t know I wanted out of a sequel series. Sometimes it’s best to go out on top.
Jeremy Irons, Tom Mison, Sara Vickers (Credit: Colin Hutton/HBO)
The Odds Were Against Watchmen to Begin With
Few comics are put on as high a pedestal as the original Watchmen. It’s a wildly popular comic that DC has tried multiple times to expand on. Most of those attempted expansions didn’t work out so well. Remember Before Watchmen? An entire series about what happened before the interesting part of the story. Not that it didn’t have its moments, but it didn’t add anything of substance to the world. It was the characters we remembered, but not written nearly as well. The little details and worldbuilding that made Watchmen so arresting were missing. Now we have Doomsday Clock which brings the cast of Watchmen into the current DC Universe. It’s fun, and I’m enjoying it a lot, but in more of a kid-playing-with-action-figures way. It doesn’t have the bite or satire of the original comic.
Then there was the movie adaptation, which was a visually faithful almost panel-for-shot retelling of Watchmen’s story. It looked amazing. I still wish HBO’s Dr. Manhattan glowed like the movie’s version did. That’s kinda all it was though. A great looking movie. Aside from the controversial change at the end, the movie also softened some of Rorschach’s dialog, making him less overtly racist. Rorschach of the movie is an idealistic libertarian hero. The movie turned him into the exact thing he was parodying in the comic. It’s a fundamental misreading the movie shares in common with every angry dude on the internet who read the comic once back in high school, luxuriated in the grit and darkness, and let the social commentary pass over their heads unnoticed. The movie is exactly what I was so worried the TV show would turn out to be.
Photo Credit: Mark Hill/HBO
So past adaptations/expansions of Watchmen all turned out to be pale imitators. Not a good sign when another is on the horizon. Then there was the fact that Damon Lindelof was at the helm. The guy behind Lost, Prometheus, and Star Trek Into Darkness. There were things I liked in all of those, but boy were they ever disappointing on a story level. At best, Lindelof has always been hit-and-miss for me. I was definitely nervous going into the first episode. And yet, he pulled it off. Lindelof, along with a team of fantastic writers and directors, put together a tight, focused, smart (and dumb when it wanted to be) 9-episode superhero how. And the biggest surprise of all: It had a satisfying ending.
Watchmen had everything going against it, and still turned into one of my favorite shows of all time. That’s an incredible feat, and I’m not sure even this fantastic team could do it again. I don’t know that you could tell a Watchmen story that tops this one. Any attempt to would either fall completely flat or blow up the stakes so high there’d be no coming back. Lindelof and crew did something really special here, and I’m not convinced it could be re-created. Crucially, they didn’t try to.
Regina King (Credit: Mark Hill/HBO)
Lindelof Isn’t Interested in Another Season
Watchmen was a big hit for HBO, and it came at just the right time. The premium network had just lost its biggest moneymaker in Game of Thrones, and that show’s finale was so bad, it soured the entire journey. Nobody was feeling a rewatch after that last season. HBO needed a win to keep customers subscribed, and Watchmen came to the rescue. It was a show you had to talk about week after week. The history! The Commentary! The twists! The Lube Man! HBO would love to have another season of that. But only if Lindelof wanted to make it.
He doesn’t. Lindelof told USA Today that he told the story he wanted to tell, and that’s it. He has no interest in making a second season, but (this part scared me) gave HBO his blessing should they want to continue the show with another writer/director. Thankfully, HBO said they don’t want to do it without Lindelof involved. We’ve seen lots of shows switch showrunners without issue, but this story felt so personal, I worry that any other team writing it would feel hollow.
Maybe this is just my American Gods paranoia setting in. After Bryan Fuller produced that wonderful, surreal first season, he left over creative differences. Since then, it’s not the same show. And Orlando Jones’ unceremonious exit from the show, after his expanded role as Mr. Nancy was one of the show’s biggest improvements on the source material, doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in what’s coming next. I don’t want that to happen to Watchmen. If the original team is done with they’re story, let them be done. I wish more American TV shows had the courage to end when the story reaches a natural conclusion.
Jean Smart (Credit: Mark Hill/HBO)
The Story Ended
And what an amazing story it was too. It was as complicated as a nine-episode comic book story could possibly be, and still managed to make everything make sense at the end. Yes, even Lube Man got an explanation in the form of a memo on HBO’s Peteypedia website. (It was basically this show’s equivalent of the worldbuilding background documents printed in the back of the original comics.) The story ended with the feeling that it had said all that remained to be said about this particular take on vigilantes and superheroes. It was a story about the exact time we’re living in that pulled no punches when it came to how we all ended up here. Any attempt at continuation risks losing something just by not coming out in October of 2019.
HBO mentioned, before Lindelof bowed out, the possibility of Watchmen becoming an anthology series like Fargo or True Detective. First of all, this series was so effective because of the way it used the characters from the comics. How it extrapolated their futures and brought them all to Tulsa, Oklahoma. If it were an anthology, you’d lose the history that made the story feel important and this world feel lived-in. As an anthology series, would future seasons even feel like Watchmen anymore?
Photo Credit: HBO
The Tulsa location was also so important to the story, it’s hard to see this show have any other setting. The comic took place (mostly) in New York. The center of the disaster that would unite the world. The shift to Tulsa let us see how the giant squid event affected everybody. Whether they were directly connected to the disaster or not. Tusla is also the site of one of the largest racist massacres in American history. The show used its superhero storyline to explore how wounds of the past still affect communities even nearly 100 years later. It’s a direct rebuttal to the people who claim that there is no racism in America because slavery and the civil rights movement were so long ago. It’s a huge, important part of the story that wouldn’t make nearly as much sense if the action were transplanted anywhere else.
It’s amazing Lindelof and his team of talented writers and directors were ever able to make a show like this. It’s unapologetically strange. It’s confrontational. It requires some pretty deep knowledge of the original comic to pick up on every aspect of the story. Watchmen was a show that expected you to have done the reading. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime achievement, and I’m so glad it’s being allowed to stay that way.
Watchmen is available to stream on HBO Now and HBO Go
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