The Bleak Future of HBO’s Lanterns

In Damon Lindelof’s new show, the good guys might survive, but they have to wade through a whole season of disappointment along the way.

Some cultural objects seem to tell the future. They may strike us as urgent or novel or strange when they first appear, but, in retrospect, we understand them to be prescient, to have seen something long before the rest of us. Moby-Dick seems to have gotten the message about literary modernism about six decades early; Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is one of the best novels about the post-9/11 global order despite coming out the year prior; The Matrix understood how digital cultures could warp and transform our social lives long before most people were continually logged on. But there maybe isn’t an example of this kind of cultural prescience that’s more uncanny or uncomfortable than that of HBO’s Watchmen.

Watchmen, Damon Lindelof’s “remix” adaptation of Alan Moore’s already revisionist superhero graphic novel, appeared in October 2019. It was, and remains, a radical piece of television. Pulling the critique of white supremacy that was latent in Moore’s comic to the surface, this Watchmen looked hard at America’s legacies of racial violence. The Tulsa Race Massacre, the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI, a compulsorily masked police force tracking down masked vigilantes—this new Watchmen came to life as an evisceration of the institutions of racism in U.S. society and as a reminder of how recently Jim Crow was the law of the land. TV Twitter was obsessed, the think piece industrial complex whirred overtime, it was crowned an achievement of unusual complexity and even importance. And its spectacular finale aired right around when a novel coronavirus started passing from person to person in Wuhan.

So, right at the beginning of the global pandemic, and a few months before the U.S. would be gripped by new protest movements and police conflicts in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, HBO ran a limited series about mask politics and the racial animus of the police state.

Watchmen’s transition from speculative to reflective has been almost too much for it to bear. When I’ve shown it to contemporary college students—many of whom began college during the pandemic—they often read it as too on the nose, a cringe relic of Woke 1.0 earnestness. It’s hard, even knowing its release date, not to see it as post-Floyd, pandemic media.

The reason a show like Watchmen has this kind of power is because of its desire to use the format (and valuable IP) of a superhero show to tell a story way bigger than a series of capers or battles with archvillains. In this way, it shares a conceptual approach with other big franchise swings like Star Wars’ Andor, a show likewise tethered to a political moment with........

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