This is the ‘Watchmen’ the Liberals Want

HBO’s Watchmen doesn’t open with a superhero fight, but rather with a little boy watching a silent movie in 1921. He’s smiling with wonder at the action and mouthing the lines before they appear on screen. It’s the story of a heroic Black marshall bringing a corrupt white sheriff to justice using the integrity of the law.

Almost immediately, though, this sweet scene dissolves into horror. A siren goes off, his mother sobs at the piano, and soon, the boy and his family are struggling to escape a terrifying war zone. The boy and his family are Black and the entire Tulsa neighborhood they live in, Greenwood, has become the setting for a racist massacre. Klan members shoot men and women while planes drop fire bombs from above. This isn’t a fanciful adventure story darkened with edgy violence but a true, unsettling portrait of an almost forgotten historic event: the Greenwood Massacre, aka the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921.

The decision to open Watchmen with this painful historic event and not some slick action sequence is a bold statement of this series’ purpose, as well as its tonal deviation from the revered source material. Watchmen is no longer about the existential threat facing costumed heroes in the 1980s, or how to save the world from nuclear annihilation. It’s now about one of the existential threats facing us in 2019: the bitter divide in our nation forged by racism. From the get-go, we’re told the villains are a revamped version of the KKK that worship the fallen anti-hero Rorschach and see masked cops as the enemy. Our heroine? Regina King‘s Detective Angela Abar, a black woman who beats the crap out of alt-right hillbillies when she’s dressed up as “Sister Night.”

This is the Watchman the liberals want, and it’s incandescently good.

Since its debut in 1986, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen has been lauded as the most important graphic novel ever written. The bleak saga imagines an alternate American history where masked vigilantes existed and a real “superman” named Dr. Manhattan was born from a freak nuclear accident. Watchmen deconstructed the hallmarks of comic book storytelling while also looking seriously at the psychological trauma haunting each of its characters. It’s a tricky, twisty, epic work of art and its meaning has been argued and reassessed again and again over the years, especially in the wake of Zach Snyder’s 2009 big screen adaptation.

Damon Lindelof’s new take on Watchmen isn’t a bootlicking homage to Moore and Gibbons’s classic graphic novel, nor is it simply a hard-edged superhero show. Set 34 years after the events of the graphic novel, Watchmen looks at a world saved from nuclear destruction, but still on the verge of collapse. A well-intentioned Hollywood liberal has been president since the early ’90s — Robert Redford, in a nod to one of the comic’s final throwaway lines — and his policies have let deep cultural fissures drift to the surface. However, as the series unravels its complex plot, it becomes clear that good and evil aren’t as black and white as they may seem from the start. It’s obvious that a violent, corrupt conspiracy is in motion.

Like the graphic novel that inspired it, Watchmen also deconstructs the various visual tics of prestige television. The camera flits between time periods and perspectives and uses tiny details in frame to convey major bits of information. This is a nod to the way comic book art works its audience, but the show also riffs on its rivals. There’s an in-show TV series called American Hero Story that not only tells the audience what the world thinks about its own history, but it satirizes the rise of ultra-violent, uncensored, button-pushing comic book adaptations. American Hero Story might be the show people think Watchmen should be, but Damon Lindelof and his team (including directer and executive producer Nicole Kassell) are pushing their Watchmen to be so much more than that.

More than anything else, HBO’s Watchmen is a heady human drama that roots its flying machines, terrorist plots, and eccentric trillionaire characters in real honest emotion. The show isn’t merely compelling because it’s slick, bold, and dangerous — which it is. Watchmen is sensational because it never forgets that humans are behind those masks. Humans with lovers, children, pain, regret, and most of all, inherited trauma. The only thing more thrilling than watching Regina King fight the bejesus out of racists is watching the Academy Award-winning actress cope with sudden grief, total terror, and tender love.

Watchmen is a spectacular show about broken people trying to fix their world, but it’s also a show unafraid to pick its own fights. Bold, breathtaking, and polarizing, Watchmen is a triumph.

Watchmen premieres on HBO on Sunday, October 20.

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