Equally predictable, Moore hasn’t even seen the show.
In fact, Moore wasn’t even aware the series was in development until creator Damon Lindelof sent him a letter about it during pre-production. “I think it opened with, ‘Dear Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen.’ That wasn’t the best opener,” Moore said. “It went on through a lot of, what seemed to me to be, neurotic rambling. ‘Can you at least tell us how to pronounce ‘Ozymandias’?'”
Like other creatives adapting Moore’s comics, Lindelof claims to truly want to do right by him. He claimed that he lost sleep and felt miserable during production of his sequel series, joking that Moore has put a curse on him.
The real venomous curse, however, has to be the hostile response Moore had to Lindelof’s letter. Moore went on to re-emphasize that nobody associated with Warner Bros. is allowed to contact him for any reason and that he had fully disowned “Watchmen” due to Hollywood’s perversions of it that have nothing to do with his own voice. Moore wrote, “Look, this is embarrassing to me. I don’t want anything to do with you or your show. Please don’t bother me again.”
HBO’s “Watchmen” went on to be a critical success, winning 11 awards out of 26 Emmy nominations. Although the show doesn’t rely on the prior knowledge of reading the original graphic novel, it thrives in its expansion of the novel’s thematic scope, specifically its “outside the margins” attitude towards America and its history of racial abuse.
