Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof has reiterated that his upcoming Watchmen television series will not be a direct adaptation.
In a series of images on his Instagram account, Lindelof shared his personal history with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal comic book in a nonlinear pattern, in a way similar to Doctor Manhattan’s experience of time. According to the post, the series was gifted to him by his late father at the age of twelve. He was then approached to develop a pilot adapting the series for HBO at the age of forty-three. At the end, Lindelof maintained the upcoming TV series will not be a conventional adaptation.
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“We have no desire to ‘adapt’ the twelve issues Mr. [Alan] Moore and Mr. [Dave] Gibbons created thirty years ago,” Lindelof wrote. “Those issues are sacred ground and they will not be retread nor recreated nor reproduced nor rebooted. They will however be remixed.”
Day 140.
This supports Lindelof’s earlier stance that the HBO series will be set in the same universe as Watchmen without the events from the story being adapted directly. Earlier, Lindelof compared his Watchmen series to FX’s Fargo as an example of an adaptation inspired by but existing only tangentially to its original source material.
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“Watchmen is canon,” Lindelof confirmed his Instagram post. “But we are not making a ‘sequel’ either. This story will be set in the world its creators painstakingly built… but in the tradition of the work that inspired it, this new story must be original.”
While Lindelof remained coy about the specifics, he teased that the upcoming TV show will “be contemporary.” Where the comic book series was created as a reaction to 1980s culture, this adaptation will be a response to the world today. While Lindelof indicates events of the comic have occurred in his show, viewers would be introduced to “new faces” with “new masks to cover them.”
The HBO adaptation of Watchmen is being developed for television by The Leftovers showrunner Damon Lindelof. While there has been no announced start date, the first season is expected to begin filming this year.