Watchmen: 7 Ups And 0 Downs From 'It's Summer And We're Running Out Of Ice'

6. It Genuinely Feels Like A Continuation Of The Comic's World

Watchmen HBO Looking Glass Sister Night
HBO

The alternate history Moore and Gibbons fashioned for Watchmen really allowed the duo to satirise Cold War-era America. It's a world where Richard Nixon served two decades in office and where the United States won the war in Vietnam, leading to the country uniting as a new state. It's also a world with superheroes and superpowers, and while the idea of situating heroes in quote-unquote "real" settings is nothing unusual these days, it was Watchmen that really started the trope as we know it today.

The disparate reality of HBO's Watchmen, while different, still very much feels like it stems from the same world fashioned in 1988. It's still 2019, but it's also a reality where Nixon held office for over a decade and where his successor is actor Robert Redford (Watchmen places his presidency at three decades). There's no internet, and squid fall from the sky at a moment's notice, so in both embodying the spirit of the original comic by providing commentary on contemporary events and by organically expanding its lore, the new series really finds success.

Those familiar with the original story should also welcome the series' ambiguity when it comes to exploring the fallout of the book's ending. There's a mystery to be solved in piecing together what happened after Ozymandias enacted his plan to bring world peace, and while that's merely a side dish compared to what the the series mainly offers, it's also right where it should be.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.