Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #26 Discusses Alan Moore’s Watchmen Comic and the HBO Show with Cornell Psychology Professor David Pizarro

Per­haps the most laud­ed graph­ic nov­el has been sequelized for HBO, and amaz­ing­ly, it turned out pret­ty darn well (with a 96% Rot­ten Toma­toes rat­ing!).

Your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt are joined by the Cor­nel­l’s David Pizarro, host of the pop­u­lar Very Bad Wiz­ards pod­cast. We con­sid­er Alan Moore’s 1986 graph­ic nov­el, the 2009 Zack Sny­der film, and of course most­ly the recent­ly com­plet­ed (we hope) show by Damon Lin­de­lof, the cre­ator of Lost and The Left­overs.

How does Moore’s idio­syn­crat­ic writ­ing style trans­late to the screen? Did the show make best use of its nine hours? Are there oth­er sto­ries in this alter­nate his­to­ry that should still be told, per­haps to reflect on oth­er recur­rent social ills or crises of what­ev­er moment might be depict­ed? Was Lin­de­lof real­ly the guy to tell this sto­ry about race, and does mak­ing the show about racism (which is bad!) under­mine Moore’s rejec­tion of (moral­ly) black-and-white heroes and vil­lains?

Some of the arti­cles we used to warm up for this dis­cus­sion includ­ed:

• “Some Watch­men Fans Are Mad that HBO’s Ver­sion Is Polit­i­cal. But Watch­men Has Always Been Polit­i­cal” by Alex Abad-San­tos
• “How HBO’s ‘Watch­men’ Can Avoid the Misog­y­nis­tic Mis­steps of Its Past” by Rosie Knight
• “The Right-Wing Troll Back­lash Against HBO’s Watch­men Is Hilar­i­ous­ly Stu­pid” by Matt Miller
• “How ‘Watchmen’s’ Mis­un­der­stand­ing of Viet­nam Under­cuts its Vision of Racism” by Viet Thanh Nguyen
• “Why We Don’t Want to Watch Watch­men Sea­son 2” by David Opie
• “When Sex Scenes Go Wrong: Zack Snyder’s Watch­men“ by Jim Vorel

You might want to also check out HBO’s Watch­men page, which includes extra essays and the offi­cial pod­cast with Damon Lin­de­lof com­ment­ing on the episodes.

Fol­low Dave @peez. Hear him on The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life, undoubt­ed­ly the apex of his pro­fes­sion­al career.

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.