‘Watchmen’ on HBO: Damon Lindelof Explains How Ryan Murphy Inspired ‘American Hero Story’

About halfway through Watchmen, Episode 2, “Martial Feats of Comanche Horsemanship,” we finally get a chance to watch the biggest TV show inside the world of Watchmen: American Hero Story.

As teased in Watchmen‘s premiere, American Hero Story is a slick and gritty drama all about the origins of masked heroes in this alternate timeline. The fictional show within a show tells the story of the first generation of vigilantes — the Minutemen — with a particular emphasis on the very first masked adventurer, the mysterious Hooded Justice. It does all this with naughty glee, as evidenced by an over-the-top content warning that runs before its debut that warns viewers of a laundry list of potentially triggering themes.

American Hero Story is also starkly different from Watchmen. Vulgarly lit and full of shocking slow motion ultra violence, American Hero Story might be lampooning Zack Snyder’s hyper-stylized feature film adaptation of the graphic novel. However, Watchmen‘s executive producer Damon Lindelof told Decider that American Hero Story had nothing to do with Snyder at all, but his love for TV super-producer Ryan Murphy.

“I just love Ryan Murphy’s television in general, but I particularly love American Crime Story,” Lindeof said. “That idea of sort of saying, ‘These are historical events. They really happened in our world, but we’re going to add a certain level of camp.'”

Lindelof added that American Hero Story was Watchmen‘s way of paying homage to one of the core thematic threads of the Watchmen graphic novel: “The Black Freighter.”

“The first inspiration for American Hero Story was — in the original Watchmen, there is ‘The Black Freighter’ — there’s this meta idea of a comic within a comic,” Lindelof said, describing the comic book read by a side character within the pages of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel. “And ‘The Black Freighter’ is actually thematically very much commenting on what’s happening in the narrative of Watchmen to the degree that you can actually intercut in between the written words in ‘Black Freighter’ and you can transpose them onto the action that’s taking place inside the world of Watchmen and it feels like the two things are thematically and narratively connected.”

Lindelof wanted to honor that within the HBO show, but immediately realized that to evoke the meta-ness of a comic within a comic, he would have to introduce a “TV show within the TV Show.”

“I just love Ryan Murphy’s television in general, but I particularly love American Crime Story.” — Watchmen showrunner Damon Lindelof

“And what should that be? So that was Question Number 1 and Question Number 2 was how do we give the audience some of the backstory — the origins of costumed adventuring, all the way back to the Minutemen and the origin of Hooded Justice…because that’s where it all began,” Lindelof said, noting that Ryan Murphy’s The People v. O.J. Simpson and The Assassination of Gianni Versace provided the perfect template for what Watchmen‘s American Hero Story ought to be, entwining “real life drama” and “prestige television.”

Once the Watchmen team settled on the conceit of using prestige TV to provide exposition, it was up to director and executive producer Nicole Kassell to figure out what that would look like on screen. Lindelof said, “[Kassell] was immediately like, ‘We can’t mock American Crime Story or American Horror Story, but we also have to make sure that American Hero Story feels very different than our show, Watchmen, or else people are going to come out of it.”

As Nicole Kassell told Decider, “That’s why we went for ultra violence, extreme slow motion. The lighting was much more garish…we kind of needed that. That show within our show has a different budget level and I had to shoot that entire sequence in one night. How do you do that? You light the grocery store with bulbs up top. You just embrace that it’s going to look different and having the colors be much brighter and pop.”

Lindelof and his writers gave Kassell another challenge to consider: that over-the-top content warning that runs up top.

“I have a 13-year-old son and he gets very excited by those disclaimers at the top of the show. I think what’s so interesting to me about them is they’re obviously designed as a warning, so that people will not be offended by nudity or violence or sexual assault, all those things. And that’s great,” Lindelof said. “But the way it’s presented is almost like ‘movie trailer guy.’ It’s sort of inviting you: this hour’s going to contain all these things that mankind is completely and totally obsessed with watching, but we’re not supposed to say we like to watch it.”

Even though Lindelof called these tantalizing disclaimers “quasi-ridiculous,” he saw a world-building use in them. In Watchmen, Robert Redford has been President of the United States for almost 30 years, imposing liberal values on the entire population.

“What would Redford’s America impose on television? What would you have to say?” Lindelof said. “The idea is that you’d still be able to show all this graphic content, but you just have to warn people that you’re about to do it in a slightly heightened way. That just kind of quietly delighted us.”

So American Hero Story isn’t just a riff on prestige television in 2019, but an immersive experience helping viewers understand the strange world of Watchmen.

Where to stream Watchmen