The first teaser for HBO’s Watchmen TV series has been released & it offers a closer look after snippets were shown in several of the network’s promotional videos.
Watchmen is said to be a love letter to the iconic graphic novel while also forging its own narrative identity. The cast includes Regina King, Jeremy Irons, Don Johnson, Jean Smart, Tim Blake Nelson, Louis Gossett Jr., Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Andrew Howard, Tom Mison, Frances Fisher, Jacob Ming-Trent, Sara Vickers, Dylan Schombing, James Wolk and Hong Chau.
“We have no desire to ‘adapt’ the twelve issues Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons created thirty years ago,” executive producer Damon Lindelof wrote in a social media post when the series was in its early stages. “Those issues are sacred ground and they will not be retread nor recreated nor reproduced nor rebooted. They will, however, be remixed.” Lindelof continued. “Because the bass lines in those familiar tracks are just too good and we’d be fools not to sample them. Those original twelve issues are our Old Testament. When the New Testament came along it did not erase what came before it. Creation. The Garden of Eden. Abraham and Isaac. The Flood. It all happened. And so it will be with Watchmen.”
Watchmen was adapted as a feature film by Warner Bros and director Zack Snyder in 2009 with results that divided fans. The new Watchmen is neither a sequel nor a remake. That’s clear in the teaser which makes major use of a signature Watchmen visual — the ink-splotch mask of Rorschach — but has no correlation to any of the events depicted in the comics which come from the creative minds of Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons.
Watchmen premieres this fall.
