HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ Was Ahead of its Time — By 9 Months

A little Black boy watching cops murder his parents and looters burn down his neighborhood. People walking the streets in mask so they can stay safe while keeping other people safe. A political divide so stark, it stretches like a scar across the country. Systemic racism infiltrating the police force, political leadership, and potentially the highest office of the land. This might all sound like a portrait of life in 2020, but it’s actually all from 2019’s hit HBO miniseries Watchmen.

When Watchmen premiered on HBO last October, it felt at times like a wildly bold experiment. Instead of faithfully adapting Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal graphic novel Watchmen, Damon Lindelof and his crew of insanely talented writers deconstructed the source material to “remix” it for 2019. This new take on Watchmen looked at an America unable to outrun the incendiary threat of institutional racism. From the opening vignette, which brought the 1921 Tulsa Massacre to devastating life, to its Black female heroine Sister Night (Regina King), all the way to the big bad being a white supremacist group plotting a massive conspiracy to take over the world, HBO’s Watchmen was screaming at audiences that Black Lives Matter.

However, it’s become more and more apparent that Watchmen wasn’t just some thrilling action adventure arguing that racism was bad. Watchmen might now be the most chillingly accurate portrayal of life we have in 2020. Between its calls for racial justice, the ubiquitous masked faces, and the tragic theme of inherited trauma, Watchmen has become a mirror for life in America today.

The original Watchmen was a 12-issue “maxiseries” published by DC Comics in 1986 and collected into a graphic novel trade paperback after its run ended in 1987. Since then, it has rocketed to the top of many fan and critics’ lists lauding the best graphic novels of all time. Moore’s attention to detail, deconstruction of the comic book genre, and cynical take on life, heroism, and modern politics all coalesced into a dense masterpiece, full of glittering threads for readers to keep tugging on. For fan Damon Lindelof, he was specifically interested in what Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias, could not have fixed with his hyper-destructive solution to nuclear brinksmanship.

“What, in 2019, is the equivalent of the nuclear standoff between the Russians and the United States?” Lindelof mused to the press at last summer’s TCA press tour. “It just felt like it was undeniably race and policing in America.”

To dive into these themes, Lindelof and his writers opened the drama on the devastation inflicted upon Black Wall Street during the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, a race riot that happened 99 years ago this week. The Tulsa Massacre has been covered up to the point that many American history nerds only heard about it through Watchmen, and some still don’t realize that it was one major part of the series based in absolute fact. From there, we follow Detective Angela Abar (Regina King) as she suits up as Sister Night to crack down on a group of alt-right white supremacists following the shooting death of a Black police officer. However, it soon becomes apparent that there is a larger, generation-spanning conspiracy at play.

Watchmen starts off by painting the cops as good guys on the side of protecting civil liberties, but winds up peeling back the layers of racism to reveal a white supremacist agenda lurking at the heart of the institutions we trust. From the Klan robe in Judd Crawford’s (Don Johnson) closet to the revelation that Will Reeves (Louis Gossett, Jr. in present day, Jovan Adepo in flashbacks) suited up as the original vigilante Hooded Justice to fight back against the white supremacists ruling the 1940s NYPD, Watchmen did all it could to make us question our saviors.

Politically charged? Sure. But so was the original Watchmen. The graphic novel’s title famously comes from the musings of Roman writer Juvenal: “Who watches the watchmen?” Moore and Gibbons’ work used this to frame their ruthless defrocking of the superhero mythos, using Watchmen to reveal the venal, selfish, traumatized, and unstable psyches lurking behind the masks of our so-called heroes. HBO’s Watchmen returned to this very concept, questioning why someone would be drawn to wearing mask. But last year’s Watchmen took it a step forward by equating the mask with a badge. It’s a sobering jump that takes on new resonance in a time where the public is screaming out for a reckoning for police officers who have inflicted untold amounts of police brutality on Black Americans.

HBO’s Watchmen was ahead of its time, by nine months. Who watches the watchmen, indeed.

Where to stream Watchmen