Watch Men?

Tomorrow will be the third episode of HBO's new series Watchmen, but I might be done already.  And I'd really been looking forward to it.  It's created by the great Damon Lindelof, who did Lost and The Leftovers.  But he seems to have taken a wrong turn in adapting the classic comic into a show.

It's really more a reimagining than an adaptation--not unlike how the TV series Fargo deals with the film. This is all to the good.  The too-faithful movie version of Watchmen didn't work, and, in any case, a series needs more to keep going.

But Lindelof made a disastrous decision.  The comic is about regular (for the most part) people dressing up and acting like vigilantes/superheroes.  It's set in the present (i.e., when the comic was published) and much of the world is still recognizable.  What's fascinating is how much has changed.  One thing the comic has on its mind are cold war issues, and I guess Lindelof felt that wouldn't work any more.  Instead, he's put racial issues front and center.

So the new Watchmen world is a place where, due to the last hundred years of history (that we get in dribs and drabs--two episodes in there's still a lot to learn), America today has roving bands of white supremacists committing mayhem (and wearing Rorschach masks--Rorschach was one of the main vigilantes in the original), and the official response seems to be creating something approaching a police state.

It doesn't have to precisely mirror our world to have something to say, but the series, so far, is embarrassingly heavy-handed in its politics and silly in its plotting.  It doesn't help that the central characters, particularly Sister Night (a new superhero created by Lindelof), are not particularly engaging or stirring.  Sister Night is played by Regina King, who's done fine work in the past--including The Leftovers.  In fact, the character sometimes seems like a leftover from that show, which was a poetic meditation on grieving, and doesn't quite fit in this new setting.

There's a lot more going on, with Doctor Manhattan (a character in the comic) living on Mars and Adrian Veidt (also in the comic) writing plays in his castle in England (I think).  But the racial stand-off so far is the main action, and it's tiresome.  Perhaps there'll be some twists and turns that make the action more intriguing and the politics more subtle.  But if it doesn't change fast, we'll just have to write this one off.  A shame.