HBO's Ambitious 9-Hour Superhero Series Is So Good, It Makes The Movie Version Look Small

Published Sep 12, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT

Zach Moser has been writing for ScreenRant since 2022, covering movies, classic TV, and streaming TV. His areas of expertise cover a wide range of genres with a particular interest in horror and drama, and the conversations around the TV and film industry. When he's not covering the latest film releases or chronicling the latest season of a new show, he's writing humor pieces for McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Slackjaw, and Points In Case or working on short stories and his second novel. 

HBO's nine-episode superhero TV show is one of the best things on the streaming service, and it ends up making the movie adaptation of the same story feel small. While the DCEU is available on HBO thanks to the partnership between HBO and Warner Bros., it's not the streamer you always think of when it comes to original superhero shows.

Disney+ and Netflix seem more like the places to go for big IP extravaganzas. HBO, on the other hand, still makes its name on prestigious dramas, though it's not unafraid to dabble in other genres. In 2019, it gave the reins to a major superhero title to Damon Lindelof, and you can thank the success of this show in part for how Lanterns got made.

Lindelof's Watchmen is a superhero miniseries that is a sequel to both Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's 1986 comic and the 2009 adaptation of that comic from Zack Snyder. Tying together two versions of the same story that have key differences seems as difficult as it does unnecessary, and yet Watchmen is essential viewing.

The series is set 34 years after the events of the comics, which ended with mass death brought about by Ozymandias in the hope of uniting the world, even if it's against an imagined existential threat. Masked vigilantes are still outlawed, but masked law enforcement is not.

After a white supremacist group, the Seventh Kavalry, inspired by Rorschach, massacred members of the Tulsa, Oklahoma police force, the TPD dons masks and nicknames in order to protect themselves and their loved ones. Angela Abar (Regina King), a detective on the force, discovers that the Seventh Kavalry has returned, a return that coincides with the arrival of figures from the events of the original Watchmen.

HBO's Watchmen Series Is Far More Cosmic Than Zack Snyder's Movie

Image courtesy of Everett Collection

Lindelof's Watchmen paints a huge world. We travel from the 1920s to the 1980s to the 2010s. Characters have memorable arcs in Oklahoma, Vietnam, Manhattan, and Mars. Other characters are connected across decades, through family members, friends, and enemies they may never have met.

One of Lindelof's own superpowers is creating rich, detailed worlds that suggest layers upon layers that would take a franchise's worth of TV shows to fully explore. It dwarfs the universe in Snyder's film, the one ostensibly set in the same world. The movie version of Watchmen looks tiny in comparison.

It's not just the setting and wide breadth of characters. Watchmen the movie takes place in tight hallways and small rooms; even when characters are outside, the settings are hazy and immaterial, or quickly flash by in montage. In Lindelof's Watchmen, the camera points up at space; we see a planet from the atmosphere; we look down from the heavens. It's a cosmic series, appropriate for a story featuring a glowing blue demigod.

The Watchmen Series Was Right To Ignore The Movie's Ending

The Watchmen does take pieces from the comics and the movies, but it tends to go with the comics more often. One of the big choices it makes is canonizing the comic ending, where Ozymandias drops a massive psychic squid on NYC. The squid's giant body crushes thousands, but the psychic shock wave of its death kills millions.

In the movie, this squid is replaced with the more garden-variety instrument of mass destruction: exploding nuclear reactors. Lindelof's Watchmen demands the squid. Not only does it come back in a big way in the series finale, but the horror and inexplicable nature of the squid's arrival is a theme of the series, where the unknown horrors of the universe and the fake unknown horrors of our prejudices can justify any action.