The Leftovers wrapped its final season to wild critical acclaim, so Damon Lindelof is sticking around HBO to develop a Watchmen TV series. Watchmen is finally getting the prestige cable drama that fans have wanted for as long as prestige cable drama has been a thing. This has been in the works for quite some time, and HBO has ordered the pilot to series.
Nicole Kassell is directing the pilot and executive producing alongside Lindelof, Tom Spezialy, Stephen Williams (who will also direct), and Joseph Iberti. Here’s everything else we know so far…
Watchmen TV Series Trailer
The first, eerie trailer for HBO’s Watchmen TV series is here!
We broke down all of the weird clues and callbacks to the original story right here.
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Watchmen TV Series Release Date
All we know right now is that it will arrive in Fall of 2019.
So what the hell is this show about? We’re glad you asked…
Watchmen TV Series Story
Lindelof’s vision is apparently unrelated to a Watchmen series discussed by Zack Snyder (who directed the film version) and HBO back in 2015. It’s not clear how far those particular talks got, or what the actual plan for it was.
The big question, then, is just what will this new series be?
Lindelof offered some ambiguous answers in a five page open letter to fans posted on Instagram last year. In it, he adopts a familiar, Watchmen-esque device of jumping around in timelines, telling simultaneously his story of his own introduction to and love for the source material, and his journey to becoming a showrunner for it. He also gives hints about what shape the series will take. It’s still a little obscure, but this is as close to a statement of intent as we get:
“We have no desire to ‘adapt’ the twelve issues Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons created thirty years ago,” Lindelof wrote. “Those issues are sacred ground and they will not be retread nor recreated nor reproduced nor rebooted.”
This is where things get a little murkier, though…
“They will, however, be remixed,” he continued. “Because the bass lines in those familiar tracks are just too good and we’d be fools not to sample them. Those original twelve issues are our Old Testament. When the New Testament came along it did not erase what came before it…it all happened. And so it will be with Watchmen. The Comedian died. Dan and Laurie fell in love. Ozymandias saved the world and Dr. Manhattan left it just after blowing Rorschach to pieces in the bitter cold of Antarctica. To be clear, Watchmen is canon. Just the way Mr. Moore wrote it, the way Mr. Gibbons drew it and the way the brilliant John Higgins colored it.”
You’ll note that there’s not a word about the film adaptation in all of this. Zack Snyder’s 2009 adaptation has its defenders, and visually it’s certainly faithful enough to the comics, but it was admittedly limited by the constraints of a movie runtime. A TV series has considerably more freedom.
But, Lindelof also cautions “we are not making a ‘sequel’ either,” he wrote. “This story will be set in the world its creators painstakingly built…but in the tradition of the work that inspired it, this new story must be original…It must ask new questions and explore the world through a fresh lens. Most importantly, it must be contemporary.”
He goes on to point out that just as the original was a product of the ’80s and the Reagan/Thatcher era, while this one “will resonate with the frequency of Trump and May and Putin.” It’s not an “end of the world” story, either.
With this new setting will come new characters, although it’s interesting that he says that “SOME (emphasis mine) of the characters will be unknown.”
We have some clues about it all here.
Watchmen TV Series Cast
And playing those “unknown” characters? It’s quite a cast. Here’s the full list, as it stands right now…
Regina King, Jeremy Irons, Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Louis Gossett Jr., Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Adelaide Clemens, Andrew Howard, Tom Mison, Frances Fisher, Jacob Ming-Trent, Sara Vickers, Dylan Schombing, Lily Rose Smith, and Adelynn Spoon.
Based on the footage HBO revealed, it appears that Jeremy Irons is playing Adrian Veidt. We have more on that right here. You can also spot Jean Smart in that footage, as well.
Deadline revealed that Hong Chau (Downsizing) will play a character known as “Lady T.” No other details are currently available, other than the character’s nationality is Vietnamese.
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James Wolk (Mad Men) has a “major recurring role” which Deadline describes as “a junior senator from Omaha.”
Deadline also has word that Dustin Ingraham (Sun Records) has a “key recurring role.” No other details are available at this time.
No details are currently available about the characters, although That Hashtag Show scored some extensive character breakdowns early on. Among them are characters with names like “Red Scare” and “Pirate Jenny” which would seem to indicate that these are code names for superheroes or villains (but again, with breakdowns like these, anything is possible), and others that are just “ordinary” names.
Watchmen TV Series Characters
The official Watchmen Instagram acount has been giving us our first look at a mysterious character from the series, as well as hints that Doctor Manhattan may be involved in some capacity. And…is that the Black Freighter?
Mike Cecchini is the Editor in Chief of Den of Geek. You can read more of his work here. Follow him on Twitter @wayoutstuff.