![]() ![]() ![]() We’re talking about our America, when it fits, and not our America, when it doesn’t. That the show exists largely on an alternative timeline - certain events, like the Tulsa massacre, are historical fact others, as with an ongoing Robert Redford presidency, might be called historical fun - lets it off the hook to a certain extent, I guess. (Not that you need a point in a comic book movie, other than, you know, “Kapow!”) Still, on the big issues, or what the show seems to suggest might be issues without significantly developing them, it frustrates me - even as, at nearly any given moment, I find it enjoyable to watch it’s a matter of the parts being greater than the sum. There is still the finish to come, so it’s possible that the show’s many threads will tie up into something like a point. This is all a bit too much for me.LLOYD: I agree that the show, from which the comic’s creator Alan Moore has disassociated himself, is a muddle, which sets us apart from what seems to be the critical consensus that something great and meaningful is going on here. Can’t wait to watch Channel 5’s Celebrity Seance or something, next week. For a story where the main mechanical thrust is “what if we had special detectives with superhero masks and cool outfits?” – and the main villain is a superbrain genius who keeps catapulting dead clones into the void of space – it is anchored in something remarkably real and raw and human. The timeline oscillates between the real-life 1921 Tulsa massacre that opens the series, the 1938 formation of vigilante justice, the 1983 events that underpinned the original comics and the year 2019, and figuring the way all the connections click together satisfies the same tangle of neurons in your brain that light up when you get a tricky cryptic crossword clue right.Īnyway, it’s great. There is the banished OG Watchmen villain Adrian Veidt (Jeremy Irons), toiling away in a mansion filled with clones there’s the existence of the shadowy Seventh Kavalry, an analogue of the Klan, who serve as the threat for the delicately constructed racial tensions that sit within the story there’s the constant void of Doctor Manhattan, Earth’s god-slash-absentee father squid keep falling out of the sky clocks keep threateningly ticking. That’s about all I can tell you without spoiling literally every other moment of the show, but safe to say other elements whirl into view like planets revolving around a central sun. In the 2019 version, the central story is this: in Tulsa, Oklahoma, no-bullshit masked detective Angela Abar (Regina King) investigates the murder of her police chief. But, on current form, it’s something very close to it. I don’t want to say “a masterpiece”, in case the series finale reveals that everyone has been dead all along again. In 2009, Zack Snyder had a go, and gave us Watchmen, which was exactly fine now, 10 years later, Damon Lindelof has taken the best bits he learned on Lost and The Leftovers and produced a sequel that is … well. To recap: in 1986, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons produced an intricate-like-a-watch limited comics series for DC that was widely thought to be totally unadaptable for TV or film (brief synopsis: masked vigilantes with human flaws, plus one unkillable superbeing, help win the Vietnam war and try to end the cold one). So to Watchmen (Monday, 9pm, Sky Atlantic), then, which is an astonishing feat of adaptation, a miracle of a series that slowly unfurls like a puzzle box: at times so cinematic as to be breathtaking, just a little bit pretentious, and unafraid to take risks (the recent black-and-white flashback episode deserves to sneak into any “best individual TV episodes of the decade” lists). I feel like quietly asking the waiter for ketchup to help me gulp it down with. Today, finally, I get a steak, and honestly I don’t know what to do with it. Normally, I am served the mince and asked to chew the gristle out of it and tell you whether or not the taste is worth the effort. A rare treat for me this week as I get to watch eight hours of exquisite prestige TV, and not the usual stuff that fills this column, like that time I saw Barry from EastEnders wrestling with a pipe full of Michael Buerk’s crap in Celebrity 5 Go Barging.
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