2019-10-16 The Hollywood Reporter

Rev iews

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 93 OCTOBER 16, 2019

Te l e v i s i o n

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Regina King (center) plays a Tulsa, Oklahoma,

police officer who dons an identity-protecting

mask to battle white supremacists.

colleagues were slaughtered in

a Christmas Eve attack three

years earlier). The connection

between the various violent events

becomes clearer toward the end of

the first episode.

King, in yet another superb per-

formance, plays detective Angela

Abar, one of the few surviving

officers from the 2016 bloodbath

to return to the job; like other

members of the force, she wears

a mask and has a superhero-adja-

cent moniker, Sister Night.

Abar is the most crucial figure

in all six episodes I’ve seen,

though there are key appearances

by the superheroes of the original

— including Ozymandias (Irons)

and Silk Spectre (Smart) — who

are now, of course, consider-

ably older. Again, some kind

of Watchmen refresher course

would be useful: If you didn’t

know that an alien squid landed

on Manhattan and prevented

World War III, that the U.S. won

the Vietnam War and President

Richard Nixon was never

impeached — actually serving

into the 1980s and being suc-

ceeded by Robert Redford, who

is still president — or that even

though it’s 2019, there’s no inter-

net or cellphones and tobacco is

illegal — then you should prob-

ably do a tiny bit of homework.

It’s worth the effort: This is

creatively bold and fabulously

written, directed and performed

television. That said, those last

three episodes will be important

to the series’ cohesiveness as

well as to the matter of whether

a second season is warranted.

Watchmen is a tour de force, no

doubt. Here’s hoping it sticks

the landing.

Lindelof fans and admirers of

prestigious HBO programming.

That’s not to say the show

won’t face obstacles. It likely will

be utterly confusing to view-

ers who don’t have at least some

passing knowledge of the origin

story; this is a series that begs for

context no matter how compel-

ling and wonderfully baroque it

is. So if you know nothing about

this Watchmen other than HBO’s

tantalizing trailers, at the very

least go read some background on

Wikipedia before jumping in.

Lindelof recently raised

eyebrows at New York Comic Con

by stating, reportedly for the

first time, that the nine-episode

first season — with its standout

cast including Regina King, Don

Johnson, Jeremy Irons, Jean Smart

and Tim Blake Nelson — could

end up being a stand-alone with

no promise or need for a second

season. (HBO sent critics six

of the nine episodes; the three

unseen hours will hold the big-

gest clues as to what a second

season would even look like.)

The series opens with a restag-

ing of the Greenwood Massacre,

a fatal 1921 incident in which

mobs of white people in Tulsa,

Oklahoma, attacked black resi-

dents. The story then picks up,

again in Tulsa, in 2019, with a

standoff between white nation-

alist racists wearing Rorschach

masks and cops who conceal their

faces as a precaution (after several

It’s difficult to describe the visual

and narrative audacity behind

HBO’s new series Watchmen,

based on the 1980s cult comic

book series by Alan Moore and

Dave Gibbons.

Given a wholly different, and

very timely, spin by creator-

writer Damon Lindelof (Lost,

The Leftovers), a superfan of the

source material, this version

(there also was a Zack Snyder

movie in 2009) is simultane-

ously unique and faithful to the

spirit of the original text — and

should prove a powerful draw for

AIRDATE 9 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 20 (HBO)

CAST Regina King, Don Johnson,

Tim Blake Nelson, Louis Gossett Jr.,

Jeremy Irons, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II,

Jean Smart, Tom Mison, Sara Vickers

CREATOR Damon Lindelof

Watc hmen

Damon Lindelof’s HBO series starring a superb

Regina King puts a bold and brilliant — though

challenging — new spin on the cult comic book series

By Tim Goodman