Watchmen shouldn't work, but it's been almost unreasonably good

UPROXX

"The thing about Watchmen is that it probably shouldn’t work at all, let alone work this well," says Brian Grubb. "It is so many things and all of them are happening so quickly. It’s a show based on a comic but it’s barely tied to the comic and is set decades after the comic ended. It plays fast and loose with a beloved text. It takes on the history of race in America as directly as any show on television and also featured an on-screen fart that lasted so long it required two separate captions, 'farting loudly' and 'fart squeaks.' It hops around through time with very little interest in telling you exactly where or when it is. Jeremy Irons is out in a picturesque space prison fishing babies out of a lake and growing them into servants, some of whom he roasts in a chamber as part of a stage play he puts on for himself and some of whom he launches into the cosmos with a giant catapult. That’s a lot. It’s just objectively a lot for a show that has only been on for eight episodes so far." Compared to Lindelof's previous show The Leftovers, Watchmen is a bigger swing. "This isn’t a niche prestige series with a tiny but passionate audience," says Grubb. "This is a huge deal piece of intellectual property, one its creator rather famously poo-poos adaptions of. There are more moving parts before you go about adding extra moving parts. The original comics featured a nude blue human god ending the Vietnam War and making Nixon a national hero. A huge squid landed on Manhattan and killed three million people and that was a diversion to end the Cold War. There was already plenty of stuff going on without the time jumps and lube men and deep dives into historically underreported acts of racial violence. The whole thing is ambitious bordering on audacious and it’s somehow become the most compelling and watchable and aggressively human show on television right now." ALSO: Why the latest Watchmen twist is so important.