Critics loved HBO’s Watchmen. Damon Lindelof’s 2019 miniseries may have divided audiences with its intense violence, byzantine intertextuality, and narrative complexity, but critics across the spectrum were seemingly united in their praise for the audacious adaptation and expansion of Alan Moore and David Gibbons’s canonical graphic novel. The book offered up an influential critique of the superhero genre, explicitly noting its fascistic tendencies, its indulgence in authoritarian fantasy; Lindelof’s miniseries took that critique and ran with it, transforming Moore’s story of an alternate-universe United States run by anti-heroic superheroes into an epic serial about the deep roots of white supremacy in the United States, from the 1921 Tulsa race massacre to the menacing specter of present-day traffic stops.
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