HBO’s Watchmen was designed to be a single self-contained season

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Damon Lindelof's Watchmen series isn't a remake of the Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel of the same name, but rather a continuation which takes place three decades later. "We treat the original 12 issues as canon. They all happened. We haven’t done any revisionist history, but we can maneuver in between the cracks and crevices and find new stories there," Lindelof said. "We wanted to make sure our first episode felt like the beginning of a new story rather than a continuation of an old story. That’s what I think a sequel is — the continuation of an old story."

While speaking with Deadline, Lindelof was asked how many seasons he has planned for Watchmen, and gave the surprising answer of "one." Of course this doesn't mean that there won't be more seasons, but it sounds like the upcoming season tells a fairly self-contained story.

Does that mean that there isn’t going to be anymore Watchmen? Not necessarily. Does that mean that I will be working on subsequent seasons of Watchmen? I don’t know is the answer to that question. We designed these nine episodes to be as self-contained as the original 12 issues. We wanted to feel like there was a sense of completeness, to resolve the essential mystery at hand. Obviously, there is a potential promise for the further exploration of the world but like the seasons of Leftovers that I did as opposed to Lost, which was designed to have cliffhanger finales and a promise of future storytelling.

Crafting an entire world, not to mention filling in decades worth of alternate history, was no small task. "When we all sat in the room and talked about what this season of Watchmen was going to be it required a tremendous amount of world building in terms of all the events that we inherited that occurred before November of ’85 when the book ends, or December I guess technically," Lindelof explains. "Then we had to create a new sense of history from ’85 to 2019, which we did and then we had to actually write the show. We did all of that work but we did not talk about what would happen beyond the resolution of this season’s story. I feel like it was hard enough just to figure out how to do this season. So my hope is that when this season ends that the audience will feel the same thing we did as storytellers, which is a feeling of completeness and resolution." The Watchmen series focuses on Angela Abar (Regina King), an Oklahoma police detective with the secret superhero identity of Sister Night. Abar finds herself investigating the reemergence of a white supremacist terrorist group who have been inspired by Roschach.

Watchmen will debut on HBO on October 20th.