As the clock counts down to Watchmen’s premiere on HBO this month, creator and showrunner Damon Lindelof has been talking to Deadline about his “spiritual sequel” to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal comic book epic, revealing that the story was designed to be told as a single self-contained season.
“I’m not being flippant when I say that the answer is one,” said Lindelof. “Does that mean that there isn’t going to be anymore Watchmen? Not necessarily. Does that mean that I will be working on subsequent seasons of Watchmen? I don’t know is the answer to that question. We designed these nine episodes to be as self-contained as the original 12 issues. We wanted to feel like there was a sense of completeness, to resolve the essential mystery at hand. Obviously, there is a potential promise for the further exploration of the world but like the seasons of The Leftovers that I did as opposed to Lost, which was designed to have cliffhanger finales and a promise of future storytelling.”
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Lindelof went on to explain that the writers mapped out the events that have taken place in the 34 year gap between the 1985 setting of the comic and 2019 setting of the series, adding: “We did all of that work but we did not talk about what would happen beyond the resolution of this season’s story. I feel like it was hard enough just to figure out how to do this season. So my hope is that when this season ends that the audience will feel the same thing we did as storytellers, which is a feeling of completeness and resolution.”
Watchmen takes place in an alternative, contemporary reality in the United States, in which masked vigilantes became outlawed due to their violent methods. Despite this, some gather around in order to start a revolution while others are going out to stop it before it is too late, as a greatly wide question levitates above them all; who watches the Watchmen?
Watchmen is set to premiere on October 20th and stars Regina King (The Leftovers), Jeremy Irons (Justice League), Don Johnson (Miami Vice), Tim Blake Nelson (The Incredible Hulk), Louis Gossett Jr. (Iron Eagle), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Aquaman), Adelaide Clemens (Rectify), Andrew Howard (Truth or Dare), Tom Mison (Sleepy Hollow), Frances Fisher (Titanic), Jacob Ming-Trent (White Famous), Sara Vickers (Endeavour), Dylan Schombing (Sharp Objects), James Wolk (Tell Me a Story), Lily Rose Smith (The Vampire Diaries), Jean Smart (Legion), Hong Chau (Downsizing) and Dustin Ingram (Sun Records).
