HBO should resist the temptation of renewing Watchmen for Season 2

TVLine

It would be a miraculous if HBO took the lead from showrunner Damon Lindelof and resisted the pull of a second season, says Kimberly Roots. "Watchmen is no Freaks and Geeks, Firefly or My So-Called Life, works of televisual art forced to live on in single-season infamy thanks to the myopic decisions of network bean counters," says Roots. "Instead, it is a fully realized love letter to Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins’ seminal work. It is a nine-part tour through a weird and wonderful world that just happens to feature some of the finest performances of the year. It is, in a word, transcendent. And how do you follow transcendence? With a Season 2 that would be hard-pressed to live up to Season 1’s achievements? With episodes that likely would struggle to tell as meaningful and timely a tale as how hate flows down through generations, poisoning everything in its flood zones? Better to let Watchmen exist as a singular season that is so layered (the music! the Easter eggs! the literal eggs!), it’ll stand up to a re-watch anytime you find yourself longing for a return to Tulsa."

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• On Monday, Damon Lindelof said he'll give himself a few months to see if he could come up with a Watchmen Season 2 idea: "Right now the space that HBO is in and that I’m in is we’re asking the question, Should there be another season of Watchmen?" he tells Variety. "And if there should be another season, what would it be? I’m not saying I don’t want to do it, or it shouldn’t exist. I’m just saying, 'Boy, every idea that I had went into this season of Watchmen.' I’m going to put up my antenna, see if it’s receiving anything. If it’s not receiving anything in a reasonable period of time — and I’ll just say off the top of my head, it feels completely and totally arbitrary, but like a couple of months doesn’t feel unreasonable, you know, January, February, maybe March — then I think we move on to your question, which is, if not me, then who? Because I actually do agree with HBO that this should be a continuing series. Maybe it’ll continue in a year or two, maybe they’ll continue it in four years or whatever, but I want to see more Watchmen."
• Watchmen gave viewers everything -- every major question was answered: By the end, says Kathryn VanArendonk, "the show became an onslaught of answers, with even more of them lurking in the Watchmen’s abounding Easter eggs and references. The anxiety to provide answers is so intense that HBO even provided thorough in-world supplementary texts, written by or about Special Agent Dale Petey...The problem with stories that answer everything is that they’re satisfying. They close with a pleasant snap, and especially in the case of Watchmen, the intense thoroughness of all the answering makes it feel like things have been fixed. The story’s done, the problems have been solved, and everyone can wipe their hands and walk away, happy with a job well done. For Watchmen, that satisfaction is itself the one troubling thing about the finale. If the show’s aim was to raise all kinds of difficult questions about white supremacy, vigilantism, inherited trauma, sacrificing for the greater good, power, and self-knowledge, then the finale provides a sense of satisfaction that feels perfect for the show’s design while also seeming a bit too neat."
• Watchmen gave its heroes a true ending: "Superhero stories don’t tend to end," says Shirley Li. "In the pages of comic books, their deaths rarely stick, they never run out of villains to face, and their backstories prove malleable. On-screen, those qualities have translated into the proliferation of both universes and crossovers, and as a result, most films and TV seasons in the superhero genre wrap up with finales that serve only to set up bigger, more epic installments: Teams are formed, upgrades are unveiled, and new villains are teased. Stay tuned, those finales say. There’s more to come. HBO’s Watchmen, however, gives its characters definitive endings."
• Watchmen ended like it began: the boldest, blackest superhero story ever told on-screen: "That’s quite a statement considering we are barely two years removed from Black Panther, a movie that made $1.3 billion at the global box office," says David Betancourt. "But it’s from here on out that the way black people consume comic book-inspired entertainment will never be the same. For one, Watchmen had the guts to put a mask on the two biggest real-life threats to black existence — racism and white supremacy — and turned those social ills into a supervillain (represented by the Seventh Kavalry) that Regina King could beat up." He adds: "So now that Watchmen is done (assuming this season is the only one), where will we go to satisfy our black superhero needs? Because let me tell you, waiting every three years for a Black Panther”movie is not going to be enough after being treated to nine consecutive weeks of this HBO series.Yes, there’s the CW’s Black Lightning, which, like Watchmen, is a DC Comics property. That’s a start. But can DC get bolder? Can it take the chances Watchmen took on HBO within its own film division? Surely there’s someone at Warner Bros. (which owns DC) who has seen what this show has achieved and is trying to figure out how to apply that swag to its superhero movies."
• If Watchmen returns for Season 2, it should be about Vietnam: Here's an idea for Damon Lindelof or for anybody interested in making a second season, says Alyssa Rosenberg. "If there is a second season of Watchmen, it should be about Vietnam, the aftermath of its conquest by the godlike superhero Dr. Manhattan, and its absorption into the United States as the 51st state. That would certainly be different from the stories that have been told in the Watchmen universe before, in which Vietnam is a sideshow or a backdrop. And it would be a fitting expression of the big idea of the stellar first season of the HBO adaptation: that there’s so much we can gain when we confront the ugliest chapters of our history and place the stories of marginalized people at the center of the American narrative."
• It’s hard to overstate how risky, how primed for disaster, was the challenge that the creator, Damon Lindelof, signed up for: "First, to adapt a notoriously hard-to-adapt subversive superhero comic," says James Poniewozik. "Then to lovingly, impishly subvert that subversion, extending the story backward and forwards in time. To do all that while reframing the story as an antiracist pulp thriller, weighty without being pompous or exploitative. Oh — and could it also be electrifying and playful and fun? Amazingly it could, culminating in 'See How They Fly,' a mind-bending, gravity-defying finale that successfully landed this improbable airship. Like a fine watch or a chicken’s egg, the symbols the finale returned to, this season was a marvel of self-contained engineering. It succeeded, first, in craft and performance, with visual invention and memorable work from Chau, Regina King, Jean Smart, Jeremy Irons, Louis Gossett Jr. and many others. It set up a domino chain of mysteries that the finale satisfyingly paid off. But it also created something more: an urgent entertainment that was as unignorable as the pealing of an alarm bell."
• Watchmen’s first season was like a mechanical watch with jewel movements: "An intricate piece of artwork deftly assembled by master craftspeople that was both meant to be admired by those who saw it and to serve a larger, more important purpose," says Charles Pulliam-Moore. "At times, it felt as if Watchmen might have needed a little bit of tuning up to getting it running on time, but once the series found its stride, it wasted no time meticulously laying out each of its delicate, narrative components, and then piecing them together in order to create a rich story."
• Based on the ratings, there’s little doubt that HBO would love to bring Watchmen back: "Though the show’s same-day linear numbers don’t qualify it as any sort of blockbuster, they’re solid enough for a new premium cable drama in 2019," says Josef Adalian. "The show’s ratings growth in-season and strong word-of-mouth, combined with impressive digital viewership, are all reasons to think HBO brass is eager to do more. (What’s more, HBO owners AT&T would no doubt love to have a buzzy critical darling such as Watchmen as part of the company’s upcoming HBO Max streaming service.)"
• The debate over whether Watchmen should return is like that age-old conundrum of “I would watch this show forever” vs. “I don’t think there actually needs to be any more of it"
• Damon Lindelof could improve on Watchmen with Season 2 as he did with The Leftovers after Season 1
• Did Watchmen spend too much time trying to over-complicate the banality of evil?
• A guide to Watchmen's stealth Easter eggs
• Presenting a Watchmen timeline, from 1891 through 2020 and beyond
• Lindelof doesn't think there was anything ambiguous about the finale
• All burning questions about the Watchmen finale, answered
• Tim Blake Nelson on Watchmen's finale: "Good narrative to me has three essential qualities to it, once you've finished it. I think it has to have been coherent, surprising, and inevitable. And those last two, trying to get those right, trying to get to something that surprises but also feels like it has to have developed in the way that it did, is almost an oxymoronic feat. And I think that Damon Lindelof achieved that gorgeously in the nine episodes of Watchmen."