Watchmen (2019 Series) Review

Starting with the Tulsa race massacre, dramatised in the opening minutes for an audience most of whom had never heard of it, is the boldest choice anyone has made with this material, and the series earns it by making that history structural rather than decorative. Regina King anchors everything as a police officer in a mask, and the sixth episode, in which a man relives his grandfather's life through a memory drug in black and white, is one of the best hours of television of its decade.

Jean Smart is wonderful, Hong Chau is unsettling, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross deliver a score that quotes the film without imitating it. The colour work, deep blues and squid rain and yellow masks, is exact. It is not flawless. The Adrian Veidt subplot on a distant moon is a long, arch digression that only pays off in the final hour, some of the conspiracy mechanics in the last two episodes arrive very quickly, and a few jokes sit oddly against the seriousness. Alan Moore refused to watch it. He was wrong.