The review covers the first six sections of a total of nine.
“This disgusting city screams under me, like a slaughterhouse full of backward children. And the night stinks of sexual intercourse and bad consciences. "
This is how the masked anti-hero Rorschach began his diary in October 1985. His over 30-year-old prose has the tune of a modern school shooting manifesto: whores and fools have taken care of the nation's depravity, liberals and intellectuals should drown in blood.
These are hard commandments. In any way, Rorschach still manages to end up being the sensible one in Alan Moore's apocalyptic comic book novel.
The Watchmen struck down as a comet when it was first released in 1986. It was proof that it was okay for adults to read the series and still has an almost iconic status today, even outside the series world.
Alan Moore showed that superheroes do not have to be good - they were not even superheroes without people, often with pretty dumb personalities in addition.
Now HBO and Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers) take over after the novel ended more than 30 years ago. So it's the same universe, but the plot has moved from New York to the small town of Tulsa in the state of Oklahoma.
The election of Tulsa is based on a real event that took place there in 1921. Hundreds of African Americans were killed in a terrible lynching. Thousands more were expelled from their homes and the event was silenced for decades. In HBO's series, society is still shaking off this trauma, even though the similarities with our reality in general end there.
If Alan Moore's Watchmen got nutrition from the Cold War's armor, then racism is the basic conflict.
Rorschach may be dead, but his vision lives on via the posthumously published diary, which now serves as an ideological manual for the racist terrorist sect Seventh Cavalry - a kind of modern Ku Klux Klan with Rorschach masks instead of hoods. They have declared war on Tulsa's predominantly African-American police force.
The main protagonist of the series is Police Commissioner Angela Abar (Oscar-winning Regina King). She works under the cover name Sister Night - after a right-wing terror attack a few years earlier, the entire police force has to work with masks for their faces.
The masks allow for handsome , but brutally abusive imagery in the pursuit of terrorists, which includes a racism detector and a relaxed contempt for constitutional rights. Everything can be presumed with the fond memory of President Robert Redford. (Yes, Redford has become president - the counterfactual history writing from the original is drawn to its absurd point)
Mind-wise, the message here is the same as in Moore's Watchmen: people wear the mask to heal internal wounds, but the mask is never able to mitigate the basic pain from which everything flows. There lies the drama.
Damon Lindelof usually begins his series with a trauma that drives the story forward. In Lost, there was a plane crash, in Leftovers it was that two percent of the earth's population disappeared without a trace. In HBO's Watchmen, it's ...
Yes what is it? We will return to that.
Lindelof's view of grieving is in any case the same as in the beautiful Leftovers series: no one will ever be okay. We only find different ways to handle it. Someone dresses up as a superhero, someone gets a literal foil hat, another neglects his family in search of conspiracies.
It is a TV series with confidence and style. The police mask's yellow masks almost glow in the dark and lead the mind to The Comedians smiley in the original: an ironic accessory by a cynic who has seen through the dark heart of humanity and therefore considers himself entitled to violence.
Cynicism radiates with wonderful humor also with the eccentric billionaire (Jeremy Irons) who bears striking resemblance to the super villain / hero Adrian Veidt. Cocaine sniffing and lovely police chief Judd Crawford (Don Johnson) has a charmingly cheerful aura around him. Trent Raznor's and Atticus Ross's vibrant, electronic compositions evoke the downfall of the series novel and signal: we are suffering.
It's bleak . But here lies perhaps the only question that scars after seeing six out of nine episodes: placing the series in Watchmen's universe means that we are in a world where an octopus monster has destroyed New York and killed three million people (the novel ends so , spoiler). But at the same time, the series takes off in the Tulsa mass murder. We as viewers do not really know which of the wounds should be patched here. Both, it seems.
It's like reviewing a coin that singles through the air: unclear which side it intends to land on.
It turns out well, and in the meantime, this is a really good TV series about racism, about grief and about how the past always catches on.