David Farnor | On 16, Jan 2020

Whether Watchmen will return for Season 2 is up to Damon Lindelof, HBO has announced.

Lindelof’s series, which premiered last October, is a modern-day reimagining of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ groundbreaking graphic novel about masked vigilantes. The show introduced us to a world where a vast and insidious conspiracy at play, an alternate history where masked vigilantes are treated as outlaws. The result embraced the nostalgia of the original graphic novel while attempting to break new ground of its own.

The cast included Regina King, Jeremy Irons, Don Johnson, Jean Smart, Tim Blake Nelson, Louis Gossett Jr., Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Hong Chau, Andrew Howard, Tom Mison, Frances Fisher, Jacob Ming-Trent, Sara Vickers, Dylan Schombing, and James Wolk.

The nine-part series saw new characters thrown into fresh chaos. Set in an alternate history Tulsa, Oklahoma, the series picked up three years after a co-ordinated white supremacist attack on police and their families, an event referred to as the White Night. Following the attack, police wear yellow bandanas to protect their identities, while The Seventh Kavalry, the group behind the attack, don familiar “Rorschach” style masks. Although the racist movement has been forced into the shadows, detective Angela Abar (Regina King) begins to realise that the terrorist group may be plotting something new.

“Damon Lindelof’s remix of Watchmen is compulsively unusual, excitingly ambitious and challengingly pertinent television,” we wrote in our five-star review of the show. “This story is being told from a new, previously unheard perspective, and if that isn’t reason enough to warrant a second season, we don’t know what is.”

The decision on renewing the programme, though, is not one HBO President of Programming Casey Bloys is taking lightly.

“It is really up to Damon at this point, he is thinking about what he wants to do,” Bloys told the press at this week’s winter TCA tour. “Truly, I don’t know at this point whether it is a returning drama series or a limited series. I think one of the things Damon did so brilliantly was, he opened up this entire world. So maybe there is another version with a whole new set of characters. I don’t know because Damon doesn’t know, and I’m taking his lead on this.”

“If it’s a season two — great, if it’s a new take on the world — great, if it’s something else completely, I’m just going take his lead,” he added.

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