Trivia / Watchmen (2019)

• Acting for Two: Tom Mison and Sara Vickers as the multitudes of Mr. Philipses and Ms. Crookshankses, who themselves were based on a couple Dr. Manhattan had met in his childhood. Mison also portrays the Game Warden.
• Acting in the Dark: True to the character, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II had no idea that Cal was actually Dr. Manhattan until they filmed the second episode.
• Actor-Inspired Element: invoked The portrayal of Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias was originally going to be very serious, but Jeremy Irons gave such a wry edge to all his line deliveries that a lot of it ended up being Played for Laughs, which worked greatly to the show's benefit since it made his standalone segments go from surrealist art vignettes (originally similar to tone and presence as the Tales of the Black Freighter excerpts from the original comic) to a Black Comedy that offset the seriousness of the rest of the show and served as makeshift Breather Episodes.
• Actor-Shared Background: Tim Blake Nelson is a Tulsa native just like his character.
• Approval of God: While Alan Moore is well known for disowning nearly all adaptations of his work (including this one), Dave Gibbons agreed to work with HBO on the series. He drew an illustration for the Bible young Jon is given, and has publicly sided with the series on the contentious issue that white supremacists would find Rorschach a role model. In contrast, he has been far less kind to Doomsday Clock.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Regina King was one of the first people on the outside to get a look at the project. Damon Lindelof sent her the script for the pilot along with a drawing of what her character would look like in costume. She agreed to star almost immediately because of it.
• California Doubling: Filmed mostly in Georgia, and takes place in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Meanwhile, the scenes at Veidt's castle were filmed in Wales, which doubles for Europa, though it briefly plays itself in Dr. Manhattan's flashback.
• The Cast Showoff: Don Johnson does a pretty good job singing a few of Curly's lines from Oklahoma! (specifically, the song "People Will Say We're In Love") in the first episode, "It's Summer And We're Running Out Of Ice".
• Disowned Adaptation: Alan Moore disowned the series from the get-go, as usual with adaptations of his creations, saying that he was "not thrilled". Damon Lindelof said shortly before its premiere that he's absolutely certain Moore placed a magical curse on him which could activate at any time. (He wouldn't be the first, as Moore has claimed to have done the very same to DC Comics previously.) Moore reaffirmed this sentiment in an October 2022 interview, saying in no uncertain terms that he hated the very idea of the series and was "embarrassed" by it. In the interview, he also stated that Lindelof mailed him a letter during the series' development which he described as "a lot of, what seemed to me to be, neurotic rambling", to which he responded saying never to contact him again.
  "When I saw the television industry awards that the Watchmen television show had apparently won, I thought, 'Oh, god, perhaps a large part of the public, this is what they think Watchmen was?' They think that it was a dark, gritty, dystopian superhero franchise that was something to do with white supremacism. Did they not understand Watchmen? Watchmen was nearly 40 years ago and was relatively simple in comparison with a lot of my later work. What are the chances that they broadly understood anything since? This tends to make me feel less than fond of those works. They mean a bit less in my heart."
• Dolled-Up Installment: Damon Lindelof first started writing the show as an original story, but when some friends pointed out it was just close enough to the Watchmen comic to risk being accused of ripping it off, he went after the license.
• Dueling Works: With DC's Doomsday Clock. Both explored the fallout of the original Watchmen but essentially went the opposite directions. The last issue of Doomsday Clock was even released in December 2019, around the same time as the season finale.
• Fake American: British Jeremy Irons plays the American Adrian Veidt.
• Fake Mixed Race: Hong Chau, who is fully Vietnamese, plays the biological daughter of Adrian Veidt, a white man by a Vietnamese woman.
• Inspiration for the Work: Lindelof said on the podcast that he decided to base the show around race and specifically the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre after reading Ta-Nehisi Coates‘s book Between the World and Me. He didn’t even know about the massacre until he read Coates’s essay "The Case for Reparation" a few years before he read the book.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Glenn Fleshler plays the virulently antisemitic Fred T and James Wolk the white supremacist Joe Keene. In real life, both Fleshler and Wolk are Jewish.
• Life Imitates Art: Not necessarily a straight example. But in an eerie coincidence, just days after the show's finale, and nearly a century after the events depicted in Episode 1, researchers in Tulsa announced the discovery of a possible mass grave containing victims of the 1921 Black Wall Street Massacre.
• The Other Darrin: Most foreign dubs of the show changed the voice actors of the returning characters from the live-action film. This is quite justified in this case for two reasons, as the series takes place three decades after the events from the comic and also because the series is a sequel of the comic book and not from the film.
  • In the Latin American Spanish dub, Veidt is replaced by Ricardo Tejedo to Gerardo Reyero, Silk Spectre II goes from Xochitl Ugarte to Yolanda Vidal and Cal/Dr. Manhattan from Idzi Dutkiewickz to Eduardo Ramirez. Curiously enough, Miguel Angel Ghigliazza, who voiced Rorschach in the film, now voices Hooded Justice instead, while Enrique Cervantes, who did minor roles in the film, now voiced Looking Glass.
  • In the Japanese dub, Veidt is replaced from Nobuo Tobita to Shūichi Ikeda, Silk Spectre II goes from Yuko Kaida to Tomoko Shiota and Cal/Dr. Manhattan from Keiji Fujiwara to Kenta Miyake.
• Playing with Character Type: Andrew Howard as Red Scare, a heroic Communist-themed Tulsa PD officer. He is usually cast in bad guy roles, bonus if they're Eastern European. However, Howard still plays the role of Red Scare as an utterly Jerkass Anti-Hero, showing that he isn't that different from his previous roles.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Showrunner Damon Lindelof has said that he's been a devoted Watchmen fan since he was a teen.
  • The show's composers, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, are also fans of the original graphic novel.
• Saved from Development Hell: The project dates back to 2015. HBO wanted to make it in collaboration with Zack Snyder, who directed the 2009 film. It didn't work out, likely due to Snyder's commitment on the DC Extended Universe, and Damon Lindelof picked it up.
• Sequel in Another Medium: A TV series as an elseworlds sequel of sorts to the comics.
• Teasing Creator: The final Peteypedia entry seems to be Damon Lindelof having too much fun with fans obsessed with the identity of "Lube Man", the only major plot point that was not resolved onscreen. Fittingly, a hidden Easter Egg features a "Have you seen this man?" poster featuring the man's likeness.
• Underage Casting: Veidt is an eighty year old man — played by 71 year old Jeremy Irons.
• What Could Have Been:
  • It was considered to put post-credit scenes in each episode in the spirit of the comic's ancillary materials, one of which would have been an interview with Ryan Murphy As Himself, as the creator of American Hero Story. Lindelof gave an adorably flattering reason why he ended up deciding against it, since he would then feel pressure to live up to the standards of a Ryan Murphy show.
  • As mentioned above, HBO first wanted to make the series in collaboration with Zack Snyder, which means it could've potentially had many similarities to the 2009 film. It entered Development Hell, then Damon Lindelof came onboard and made it his own.
  • Ten episodes were originally planned for the first season. However, after completing "This Extraordinary Being", Lindelof felt that the story was closer to its ending rather than a midpoint, and that if they continued for four additional episodes, one of them would have had to be filler, and instead opted to conclude the story with only three episodes.
    • According to Lindelof, the omitted episode would have likely covered more of Lady Trieu's backstory (though it would not have been exclusively devoted to that topic), with that material instead being folded into both "An Almost Religious Awe" and "See How They Fly".
  • Damon Lindelof stated he completed the story he wanted to tell with the one season, and gave HBO his blessing to continue the show with someone else if they wanted to keep it going. They replied that his vision was so integral to the show’s success that they wouldn’t do it, leaving its fate in limbo unless he comes up with another idea that he feels would be worth telling.
  • Sigourney Weaver was originally asked to play Laurie, but turned it down. A couple of years later, Jean Smart thanked her for the Career Resurrection she was able to build off the role.
• Word of God:
  • American Hero Story is in fact the work of Ryan Murphy, who in this reality is a Reclusive Artist who the public has almost no knowledge about.
  • Damon Lindelof reconciled the series version of Hooded Justice as a young black man fighting against racism with the InUniverse account by Hollis Mason that Hooded Justice supported Nazism by saying Will had, much like with his use of whiteface, only feigned support of Nazi Germany to hide the fact he was really African-American, as well as some of his comments, including "Frankly, I don't go in for all this razzle-dazzle," were subtle "Fuck you"s to Nelson and their fellow Minutemen.
  • About the ending, Lindelof said that the final shot isn't meant to be interpreted with ambiguity.
  • Lindelof said the reason Dan Dreiberg isn’t in the show is that he’s a hero out of altruism and would be out of place with the miniseries' Central Theme of trauma. Additionally, Lindelof wanted to have a fair balance of old and new characters within the show, and felt that adding Dan would have tipped the balance too far away from the new characters (with the writing staff only considering using established characters that would best serve Angela's story so that she would remain the focus).

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