Watchmen is a lurid, freewheeling satire, interrogating the American worship of violent superheroes

The New Yorker

"Initially, Lindelof seems to be modernizing the story in the earnest way that many TV shows do: by making the cast diverse," says Emily Nussbaum of Damon Lindelof's HBO take on the classic Alan Moore-Dave Gibbons comic book series. She adds: "But, from early on, there’s a tingling, cathartic uneasiness to this inversion. What are we to make of a story in which the starkest narratives of Black Lives Matter are replicated, only with a black cop and a white victim? In which the police kidnap suspects, then test them for bigotry? It takes a while to sort out the history, but, once it begins to unfold, it’s a bombshell. Lindelof’s Watchmen reorders the fictional universe, writing buried racial trauma—from slavery to lynching—back into comic-book mythology, as both its source and its original sin, stemming from the Ku Klux Klan, a group reawakened, back in 1915, by the original masked-hero blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation." ALSO: Damon Lindelof explains Sunday's big Watchmen reveal.