Damon Lindelof, the writer and producer of Lost and The Leftovers, is teaming up with HBO to bring Alan Moore’s Watchmen to television.
Damon Lindelof is fresh of creating one of the best shows ever seen on TV. I’m talking about The Leftovers, not Lost. The writer/producer certainly knows his stuff when it comes to TV. His shows have been wildly successful, but none of them quite hit the level of critical success that Leftovers did. His work for the big screen hasn’t been quite as impressive with movies like Cowboys vs Aliens, Prometheus and Tomorrowland all falling a bit short of the very high standard we’ve seen from his TV shows.
He’s been rather quiet on what he’ll be working on post-Leftovers, but his silence has now been broken via an Instagram post which confirmed that he’s going to be bringing the famed graphic novel, Watchmen, to the small screen. The image in question was of a statue of Nite Owl (one of Watchmen’s many characters) standing on a table in what was supposedly a “writer’s room”. The last person to take on the ‘unfilmable’ book was Zack Snyder, who did a solid, if a little patchy, job with the source material. It’s arguably his best work, and to be fair, he really did succeed in bringing the story to life on the big screen.
Yet, Watchmen does feel better suited to the TV series format, mainly because there’s just so much stuff to cover. The idea of Lindelof adapting it for TV also really excites me since he’s got such a good track record at writing engaging characters that we really care about, as well as creating shows with incredible spectacle and beautiful set pieces specifically for television. He seems to thrive in the medium and currently is producing some of his best stuff.
Watchmen is set in an alternative timeline and takes place near the end of the 20th century where costumed ‘superheroes’ have altered the course of the war in Vietnam. Thanks to them – mainly Dr. Manhattan, an all-powerful blue being – the US wins the battle against the Vietcong which subsequently extends Nixon’s run as President. With World War III now on the horizon, this group of superheros, called Watchmen, start to investigate the death of one of their own, The Comedian. Nite Owl, Dr. Manhattan, Silk Spectre, Nite Owl and the ever-so-slightly unhinged Rorschach’s enquirers lead them to uncover a government conspiracy which could see the end of their group of heroes and destroy the entire world.
They are working on the pilot episode as we speak and Watchmen promises to be of a very high production value, along the lines of fellow HBO shows: Game of Thrones and Westworld.
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