For your reading pleasure in celebration of the Emmy’s, please enjoy this excerpt from our giant interview with seven of the writers from HBO’s Watchmen. If you enjoy what you’ve read in the excerpt – we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the article by by subscribing to Backstory Magazine where it can be found in Issue 41!
The subscriber version of this article contains a wealth of exclusive material including how Dr. Manhattan came to be a part of the show, the discovery they made in episode 8 that made the whole series work, the Adrian Veidt scenes, Looking Glass’ history, the six months of work Lindelof and Jeff Jensen did before the room was convened and much, much more.
Watchmen
Inside the writers’ room of HBO’s groundbreaking series
By Danny Munso
Watchmen has never felt more relevant. Released in the fall of 2019, Damon Lindelof’s nine-episode opus that dealt with white supremacy, racial injustice and the role police officers play in both feels only more vital in light of George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter protests that have taken place in 2020. The series—a continuation of sorts of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal 1986 comic series—received near universal praise for its bold storytelling and deep meditations on the state of the world, all while wrapped in the artifice of a superhero story, which is exactly what Moore and Gibbons’ series did several decades ago. To celebrate the series’ record-setting number of 2020 Emmy nominations, Backstory sat down with seven of the series’ writers—Lila Byock, Christal Henry, Cord Jefferson, Jeff Jensen, Claire Kiechel, Stacy Osei-Kuffour and Carly Wray—to hear how the historic show came together.
Krypton
A major inspiration for Lindelof’s Watchmen came in the form of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2014 essay in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” which has a paragraph about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. It was an event Lindelof —and countless millions of other Americans —never knew about. Lindelof both wanted to shed light on the event and use it as a jumping-off point for his Watchmen story. To him, the event felt like it could be Hooded Justice’s version of Superman’s home planet of Krypton—a place that birthed a superhero. (Lindelof details his thoughts on Tulsa and Hooded Justice in our interview with him in issue 39 of Backstory.) And in the opening scene of Watchmen, that’s exactly what happens as we’re introduced to a young boy named Will, who grows up to be Hooded Justice and grandfather of the show’s heroine, Angela Abar (Regina King). Of course, Krypton is a place of fiction. The massacre was a real-world event that has and still causes a lot of pain. Now that the show is released to wide acclaim, it has brought an incredible awareness to the event that was never there. But in the writers’ room two years before, it took incredible confidence from the staff that this could be accomplished in a sensitive way. “From my point of view, it was one of the things I was attracted to the most,” Henry says. “You want to approach it in the most respectful way possible so it wasn’t something anybody took lightly. But for me, I thought it was important we talk about it because I didn’t know about the Tulsa massacre until college, which is upsetting because I should have heard about it early in my education. It’s something that’s been omitted from the history books, so I didn’t come to it from a place of fear. I felt it was important and that we had to do it.”
Osei-Kuffour was all for tackling it as well, because similar to how the first episode of the show was when a lot of individuals—including this writer—even heard about the massacre, she first learned of it in her initial meeting about the show with Lindelof. “As a black person, I didn’t understand why I didn’t know about this,” she says. “And then I realized there were people out there who made it so I would never know. So because of the anger and emotions I was feeling after realizing that, I said, ‘Let’s go, let’s put it in.’” And the massacre’s inclusion becomes thematically important as the series moves forward because Will’s trauma ends up informing Angela’s, even though the pair don’t meet until the end of the pilot, when Will is 100 years old. Generational trauma is a major theme throughout the series. “It was the job of the room to build the infrastructure that made [the inclusion of the massacre] feel organic,” Byock notes. “It was hard work and scary because the original text has almost nothing to say about race. So figuring out how to retrofit this incredibly nuanced, painful and necessary conversation about America’s traumatic racial history onto source material that didn’t have a place for it in the original was tricky. It was really wrenching, difficult and at times painful work to do.”
Kiechel adds that if they were going to include the massacre in the show, not to mention that it was the opening scene of the whole series, the writers had to make sure they paid that off throughout the series as well. “We had a lot of conversations about what our responsibility was and a lot of conversations about how far we should go,” she says. “Was it the responsible thing to begin the show in the midst of this real tragedy, or should it go somewhere else? We decided if we were going to start a show like that, we had to make sure throughout the series that we’re really earning what we did in that first episode.” She was a big champion of making sure one of the final scenes of the series was set at the same movie theater in which we first meet Will in the first scene of the pilot. “I felt we had to figure out a way to bring that back to tie everything together. I felt it really wrapped up thematically what we were saying about history and trauma, and we needed to make sure that it was all very much of a piece.” All the writers credit Lindelof with having the guts—and the clout—to take a major chance that could easily have blown up in everyone’s face. No one knew this more than Lindelof himself. “When he called to ask me to join the show, he said, ‘Here’s the deal. This will either be groundbreaking or it will ruin at least some of our careers,” laughs Wray, a TV vet who had worked with Lindelof before on The Leftovers. “I always agree with Damon, and I feel I would rather be part of an incredibly ambitious failure than a mediocre success. But it was a really, really big swing. That’s definitely the Lindelof way.”
You Can’t Heal Under a Mask
Just as Hooded Justice’s backstory was Lindelof’s first grand idea for the series, the early days of the room were spent dissecting that character and its possibilities. He was of particular interest to Osei-Kuffour, who had consumed the comic for the first time in advance of her job interview with Lindelof. “I found myself really drawn to the Hooded Justice character because of the rope stuff,” she says. “And then when I met with Damon toward the end he asked what I thought of that character and I told him I was so drawn to that character and asked him why? And he said, ‘That’s my pitch: that he is a black man and he’s going to put makeup on his eyes to disguise himself as a white man.’ I just kept thinking, Please pick me. I thought it was the coolest idea and something I could truly lend my voice to.” One of her writings Lindelof had read before giving her the job was a play called Hang Man, about the investigation of a hanging in Mississippi. “I felt I had been trying to do this for years,” she said.
In the initial days of the room, Lindelof gave the writers a homework assignment, something he often did for an unanswered question he wanted them to work on away from the room and then pitch to the group: In this case, it was, How did Hooded Justice come to wear a noose around his neck as part of his costume? Multiple writers described being awestruck as Cord Jefferson pitched his take in the room the next day, which ended up completely intact onscreen: Will was a former cop attacked by his fellow officers and hung from a tree as a warning before they cut him down. On his way home, as he still had the noose around his neck and the mask they put over his face in his hands, he sees a wealthy couple being robbed in an alley. He puts the mask on and enters the alley to beat up the criminals—and Hooded Justice was born. “I think it’s one of those things where it’s about the context,” Jefferson says. “If you are a white reader who’s looking at Hooded Justice in the original text, you see a noose around his neck and the black hood and you might think, Oh, this is an executioner. But for a black reader like me, I see that and I can’t help but think of America’s history of lynching. And Damon said at the outset he wanted Hooded Justice to be black, so I was thinking of him as a black character who walks around with a noose around his neck, and there’s no way you can look at that and not see some of sort of racial violence there.” That is exactly how the story plays out in the series’ greatest episode, “This Extraordinary Being,” for which Lindelof and Jefferson won an Emmy. Angela experiences her grandfather’s backstory for herself after ingesting his Nostalgia pills, which allow her to relive his memories as her own.
There was another key element to Jefferson’s pitch—that Will (portrayed in the episode by Jovan Adepo) wasn’t going down that alley to do a good deed. He was going out of anger and a desire to hurt somebody. “We took that from the source material because the descriptions of his vigilante work were always described as being really, really brutal,” he says. “I remember thinking that rage signifies somebody who’s not just out to stop the crime, they really want to punish the people committing the crime in a very real way. And race was certainly a part of that. This was a man who had been trying to live his life on the straight and narrow for decades and had just suffered one of the worst traumas anybody can suffer. He’s trying to pretend he didn’t suffer it, but there’s always this sort of boiling anger and resentment and rage just beneath the surface. I think there’s no way to discuss that character without that.” That led to larger discussions in the room about how the rage would come across on the screen. “Those were hard conversations,” Osei-Kuffour notes. “Because black male rage can be a stereotype and we wanted to make sure we didn’t make Will’s anger that. We wanted to show that black men are angry, and rightfully so because look at what is happening to them. It was important for us to show all the details of that.”
The Nun with the Motherf%&$ing Gun
Not a lot of specifics were figured out about Angela when the room officially opened. One thing set in stone was she would be a black woman and a masked vigilante who is also a cop. This especially spoke to Henry, a brilliant writer who has forged a decade-long career but used to be a cop herself in Chicago. “I made it clear to Damon that I was a black woman first and a cop second,” she says. “Having that badge didn’t exempt me from discrimination. I was a target like every other person of color was. So I saw it both ways. I also got it both ways growing up on the south side of Chicago. We saw a lot of police brutality. So I was excited a lot of those things ended up being major parts of the show. But as far as her specific backstory and all of the Sister Night stuff, we developed all of that together in the room.”
Angela’s alter ego is Sister Night, which requires her to dress up as a nun and paint the area around her eyes similar to the way her grandfather did for his outfit. The name Sister Night was floating around in the room but the nun getup was conceived by Osei-Kuffour as a response to one of Lindelof’s homework assignments. “I’m really obsessed with blaxploitation films,” she says. “And our assignment was to pitch a blaxploitation film for Sister Night, and I came in the next day with this crimefighting nun, and Damon was like, ‘Yes, that’s what we’re doing.’ I think that was my first time seeing one of my ideas on the board, so when the posters went out for the show, it was emotional to see Regina King in that costume.” Osei-Kuffour also penned the lyrics for the Sister Night theme song, which gloriously lives on thanks to Agent Petey’s archives, a page of supplemental material for the show that has a home on the HBO website. That moment was significant for Osei-Kuffour. “Watchmen was only my second show, and so at first in the room, I was extremely intimidated. That was hard for me. Damon pulled me aside one day and asked how I was doing. I told him I was okay, but I don’t think I really was. I was struggling a bit, and he said, ‘Look, I hired everybody for different reasons, and I don’t want you to feel like you have to be anybody else but yourself.’ That set me free. And the next day is when I pitched the Sister Night stuff. I think that’s why the writers’ room was so unique.”
Though the events of “This Extraordinary Being” are centered on Will and his journey as Hooded Justice, it also allowed the writers to build insight into Angela’s character. When breaking the episode, it was up for debate whether it would be a complete flashback to Will’s life or if, because Angela took the pills, we would see her throughout the memories. That’s what was settled on: There are times in the show when Angela appears where Will should. “We knew we didn’t want to make her appearances so frequent it took the viewer out of the surreal experience of the episode,” Jefferson says. “But we ended up choosing the moments that would be the most powerful. One of the best ones for me was when June [Will’s wife, portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler] is saying he’s full of anger. And when we cut back to what should be Will, it’s Angela and she’s saying, ‘I’m not angry.’ Since generational trauma is one of the themes we were trying to get across, that’s really solidified in that episode because Angela is feeling the anger her grandfather felt 100 years ago, but she’s also unwilling to admit it.”
Excalibur
As the writers discussed the comics in great detail, a desire emerged in the room to redeem the character of Laurie Juspeczyk, aka Silk Spectre II. While her backstory is interesting in the text—she is the product of a relationship between two superheroes, The Comedian and the first Silk Spectre, that began with a sexual assault—ultimately she is there to serve other characters, including both of her parents and the two men with whom she is involved, the god-like Dr. Manhattan and Dan Dreiberg, aka Nite Owl. “We were very motivated by wanting to do right by Laurie and find some way to improve what we thought was Watchmen’s least interesting character, to be honest with you,” Jensen says. “That was our mission.”
The writers agree that Byock emerged as a key voice in finding this older Laurie that was going to inhabit their show. “Lila had such an insight into the character, and she really understood what her tone and her voice was,” Kiechel says. “In the room, she was always an advocate for what Laurie would do.” Byock became such an expert on Laurie that Lindelof asked her to take actress Jean Smart out for drinks to give her a download on the character she would be portraying. Smart was added to the series late and didn’t have the prep time the other actors did, but she had Byock’s expertise, which she has routinely commended in multiple interviews for her now Emmy-nominated role. “I’ve been privileged to get to work with a lot of great actors before, but I’ve never had to take an actor out for drinks and give them coverage on one of the great works of literature of the 20th century and say, ‘Here’s her entire backstory, here’s how she fits into the broader story, and here’s everything we’ve imagined for her for the last 30 years. That was a lot and I felt bad, but she got it immediately. She seemed to intuitively understand the tone we needed for Laurie, which is a mix of pathos and dry wit.”
Laurie enters in the series’ third episode, “She Was Killed by Space Junk,” penned by Byock and Lindelof. The episode received a lot of attention for two reasons. One, it’s a brilliant and beautifully crafted reimagining of a legacy character, and two, it featured a giant blue vibrator. Alone in her hotel room, Laurie opens a silver briefcase to reveal the sex toy meant to represent Dr. Manhattan’s genitals accompanied by an old Esquire cover featuring the young her in full Spectre garb hugging Dr. Manhattan. On the surface, it’s a moment that could be played for comedy. Instead it’s actually incredibly sad, providing considerable insight into Laurie’s character. “When I pitched it, I was mostly trying to get a laugh out of Damon,” Byock confesses. “But I also know Damon well enough that you can’t pitch anything as a joke without expecting him to take it seriously and run with it, and so I wasn’t totally surprised when he said, ‘That’s it.’ But there’s real pathos in that moment. To me, it’s not so much about her holding a torch for Dr. Manhattan as it is her mourning something about her own past or her own heyday. A lot of the show is about nostalgia, and Laurie presents herself as somebody adamantly uninterested in nostalgia. So this is her little secret—or big secret, as the case may be.”
While Laurie is a crucial figure in the series, Dan Dreiberg only gets a quick mention in one episode and he is the only surviving main character from the comics who doesn’t appear in the show. And there may be a very important reason for that. “Damon will hate me saying this, but what the heck, we’re not doing a season two,” Jensen laughs. “It became a running joke in the room that Damon hates Dan.” It turns out Lindelof might not have been alone in his feelings that Dan’s presence in a new version of Watchmen wouldn’t yield the same dramatic results as some of the comic’s other key players. “We talked a lot about Dan in particular because in a lot of ways he’s the least complicated character in the book,” Byock says. “So there were a lot of debates about Dan and whether or not he’s an interesting character, and we did talk about having him in the series in various ways. But ultimately, we wanted our story to live in the present and be haunted by the past. And to us it felt like Dan didn’t have much of a story in the present the way Laurie did.”
The writers actually did a lot of background work for Dan that didn’t end up on the screen, at least not in tangible ways. As part of their attempts to flesh out Laurie’s complete backstory since the comics, they conceived of a past where she and Dan continue to fight crime together—including halting the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing—before Dan is arrested for illegal vigilantism. (The story can be found in full in Agent Petey’s archives.) In the series, Dan is still imprisoned and, other than a quick allusion by Senator Keene (James Wolk) that he can get Dan out if Laurie helps him with a case, otherwise absent. “One thing we all felt early on was if a character from the Old Testament [what the writers called the comics] was going to be in this, we had to have a good story for them,” Jensen says. “And if we didn’t, they shouldn’t be in the show.”
Every Moment We Were Together
The word that keeps coming up in conversations about the writers’ room is collaborative. The room —which included the scribes interviewed here plus Lindelof, executive producer Tom Spezialy, supervising producer Nick Cuse, supervising producer Janine Nabers, consulting producer Branden Jacobs Jenkins and writers’ assistant Ryan Lipscomb—was a groupthink on the level not most shows never get to.
Jefferson, a veteran of genius shows The Good Place, Succession and Master of None, notes the group bonded in a deep way simply because of the subject matter. “There’s such a third rail in this series in terms of racial violence and policing,” he says. “There are so many high-tension discussions, and since we worked on it for literally over a year, we had a lot of time to really dig down in the details of how people felt about all this stuff. I really love that and am happy to do it, [but] it was certainly the most intense show I’ve ever worked on as far as the topics involved.” The series clearly left a mark on all the writers, some of whom are now running their own shows but taking the lessons they learned on Watchmen and applying them to their own rooms. Jefferson is one of those who just completed his first writers’ room as a showrunner for a series about his time as a writer at the website Gawker. He recounts a story Lindelof told him from the Leftover days about him pitching an idea for a character to wear a bulletproof vest and hire a woman to shoot her. (Fans will know that iconic moment.) When asked by someone else why the character would do that, Lindelof said he couldn’t explain it but it felt like the right thing to do. “Before I started working on Watchmen, storytelling for me was a crystalline structure where all the i’s would be dotted and all the t’s would be crossed, and everybody would understand everything,” Jefferson says. “Anybody who’s a fan of Damon’s material will know he likes to leave questions unanswered. That’s something I learned from him. Even if you can’t intellectually explain something, follow your instinct to what feels right. And it’s alright if you leave the audience not understanding something or they have to try and figure it out themselves. For me, that element of mystery and surprise is something I lean into nowadays. I would have backed away from that before Watchmen.”
Wray is a veteran of some of the best series of the past decade, including Mad Men and Westworld, and has been in every type of room. Watchmen was different. “The degree to which these episodes were broken out in the room and written out on the board was the most elaborate and in depth of any show I’ve been on,” she says. “Even the small decisions and lines of dialogue are discussed by the entirety of the room with Damon before they end up in an outline. You have to weigh in on every idea, and there’s no sitting it out or Damon will call on you and say, ‘What do you think about this? How’s it sitting with you?’ So it was a full-contact, high-participation game in a way that was pretty unique among all the experiences I’ve had.” Osei-Kuffour points out Lindelof would go a step further and put each idea through a vote. “He likes to say it has to go through Congress,” she notes. “So if one person doesn’t like the pitch, even if nine other people like it, it’s not going to go on. That could be frustrating at times, but I look back now and [see that] he does this so we can all feel like it’s our show and we can all be excited about the ideas we’re putting out in the world.” Those ideas formed a show that both entertained and educated viewers in a time when our own world continues to spin off its axis. Dr. Manhattan may be gone, but there is little doubt that Watchmen will live forever.
Like what you’ve read? We hope you’ll read the rest of this article hear much, much more from these incredible writers and learn more about the process that resulted in Watchmen.
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