Watchmen: Premiere at NYCC brings cheers from fans

HBO’s follow up to Alan Moore & Dave Gibbon’s classic, Watchmen, premiered at NYCC. Fans cheered. The cast and creator are still nervous. We’ve got details!

Per a report from Deadline, HBO’s Watchmen premiered to the thunderous applause of 2,000 fans lucky enough to be able to attend a screening at New York Comic Con. After the show screened, most of the principal cast were brought out on stage with series creator Damon Lindelof (The Leftovers). The cast includes Regina King (Seven Seconds) as Detective Angela Abar/Sister Night, Jeremey Irons (Justice League) as Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, Tim Blake Nelson (Angel Has Fallen) as Looking Glass, Jean Smart (Legion) as Laurie Blake/Silk Spectre, Louis Gossett, Jr. (Hap and Leonard) as Will Reeves, and Hong Chau (Homecoming) as Lady Trieu.

Lady Trieu sounds like the younger, newer version of Ozymandias from the original graphic novel. Chau is quoted in the Deadline report as saying that Lady Trieu is “…A boss bitch…She’s an enigmatic trillionaire and no one knows what she’s up to.” In a separate interview with Deadline, Lindelof would not confirm that Irons is playing Ozymandias. He’s only playing Veidt, who is on a parallel storyline that will eventually collide with the main plot of the show. That’s interesting, considering Irons is credited as Ozymandias on IMDb.

The far more interesting part of the interview concerned the central plot. It takes place approximately 34 years after the events of the original Watchmen, which saw Adrian Veidt kill millions of innocent people in order to trick Earth’s population into world peace. It’s not all rainbows and people united in held hands. White supremacy and general corruption are running rampant in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The story is based on the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. In the years after World War I, segregation was firmly in place. Racial tensions were high. And, the economy was booming. The segregated neighborhood of Greenwood, which had a thriving business district known as Black Wall Street, was burned to the ground when a young black man was falsely accused of sexually assaulting an elevator attendant. It’s a part of American history that isn’t well known or taught to this day.

Lindelof says that Regina King was looking at producing a project about Black Wall Street when he showed her the script for Watchmen. He was compelled by the story when he read about it in author Ta-Nehisi Coates’ (The Water Dancer) article The Case for Reparations from The Atlantic. Lindelof was conscious of being a white guy telling that story. While he fully takes responsibility for Watchmen and its pilot, Lindelof does point out that only a third (four of twelve) writers in the writers room were white dudes. Hopefully, those eight other voices were fully heard and not just pretty numbers. Lindelof insists that is the case.

When asked about how long the Watchmen story could go, Lindelof said that they constructed the entire run of the show to exist in this one season of nine episodes. He wouldn’t refuse a renewal. But, Lindelof is also not interested in cliff-hanger season finales for Watchmen. The story will be self-contained and explained by the end of the first season.

Fans of the original graphic novel can check Watchmen out for themselves when it hits all HBO platforms on October 20.