We tried to watch the first episode of Watchmen with people, like me, who read the comic when it came out. The show was woke, racial gobbledegook that did to the comic and movie what my colon does to salad.
WATCHMEN was a comic that was specifically
about comics, and did things that you can only do with the comic medium. It should have remained a standalone, 12-issue series, with no follow-ups of any kind. A completely self-contained, limited story (and universe) which insists upon itself.
While I do have a certain fondness for the 2009 film, despite it being a Hack Snyder production, making a live-action adaptation of a comic about comics totally misses the point. Also, it would have worked better as an episodic TV miniseries. While certain elements of the movie are spot-on, it sort of amazes me how Snyder and his screenwriters completely missed the point of various scenes and moments. And you can very easily tell where the screenwriters’ subpar work comes in to condense or patch over parts of the comic which were cut for time or rewritten.
As is inevitable with any successful work, DC started trying to exploit WATCHMEN with merchandise and whatnot, over the past two decades. And then the floodgates opened, with a barrage of comic book prequels to the series, and the stupidity of actually crossing the WATCHMEN characters over with the actual DC Universe and its characters.
Setting aside my mixed feelings about Moore, WATCHMEN, and its legacy (its long-term impact of the industry has proven to be profoundly negative, and, as with so many Moore projects, it’s a deconstructionist riff built on the works of other people), I’m quite appalled by the continued attempts to exploit it. For me, the TV series was a non-starter. Didn’t watch it, don’t care. Everything I heard about it put me off. To say nothing of the fact that it was intended as a sequel to the comic, not the movie, which was a perfect way to confuse the average viewer.
And as has been said elsewhere, the first season was
so successful and
so acclaimed that they decided not to renew it for a second. Funny, that.
deadline.com
