title: Introducing The Official Watchmen Podcast
author: The Chernobyl Podcast
contenttype: podcast
publication: The Chernobyl Podcast
published: 2019-11-03T21:00:43-05:00
sourceurl: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.megaphone.fm/PSM3258791754.mp3
word_count: 2137
Hi, I'm Craig Mason. A lot has happened since you last heard from us. Our mini-series Chernobyl, one, ten Emmys, and over ten million of you listen to this podcast. Peter Sagle and I are not about to abandon you. We've got additional episodes planned where we're going to continue to talk more about the show dig deeper into it. In fact, our next discussion is going to be with the director of Chernobyl, all five episodes, Johann Rank. But while you're waiting, I'm hosting another podcast you might like and I'm doing it because I legitimately love this show. HBO's new dramatic series Watchmen. On the official Watchmen podcast, that's what we're calling it, I talk one-on-one with Watchmen's writer and executive producer, Damon Lindelof. So I get to be Peter Sagle this time and we do go very deep Chernobyl style. Each episode of the podcast covers three episodes of the TV show and we are going to get into everything. We get into themes and character, plot and production. This conversation is writer to writer with exclusive insights as Damon and I help guide you through the fascinating world of Watchmen. And just like Chernobyl, you're going to want to watch the show first for listening to the podcast. In fact, it's really important with this one because they're spoilers galore. But here's a relatively spoiler free excerpt of my first conversation with Damon Lindelof. I do want to talk about how you give us information. I told you earlier when we were talking about doing this show that one of the things that I marvel at in this show is the way that you do so much expositionless exposition. Meaning there's an enormous amount of information to get across. Like for instance, in this world there are no cell phones, but there's still a pages. But it's still a modern world but there's no internet. Vietnam is a state we come to understand the truth of the Tulsa race riots through combined with exposition about a law that leads to red forations. Red forations have been mentioned earlier. And right away we know that red forations must be some sort of nickname like Obamacare for reparations. Right. All of this information, so much information. Not only do you have to tell us who everyone is, what they're doing, why they're doing it, you also have to tell us how this world is different from our world. And you have to do it all without beating us over the head and you did. Can you talk through how much attention you pay to the way deliver information in these shows? The first rule is how I think that you said like you did it. And I would say like for people who are listening to this podcast probably but a lot of people probably watch Watchmen and they were like this feels like the Sunday crossword to me. Like I can't get like one across three across nine across 18 across. I'm just going to put it away. So in a sense you and look, you've been down this road before. Yes. This is your third time down this road by my reckoning where you've created a bit of a puzzle box. Yeah. At this point, you're probably you've just decided, look, I'm going to get a certain chunk of this audience and thrill them to know and some people are going to watch this and just go, I'm confused by is that kind of do you just decide that I've had or do you think no, I can get them. I'm going to say something that's just completely and totally arrogant and it runs counter to this other emotional idea. So the arrogant thing is you have to make the show that you would want to see. That's the arrogant thing, right? Like if you're trying to make it for someone who's not you, you'll never know if you're making the right show. And then the second thing is I want everybody to love it. Of course. I want everybody to love it and I want everybody to love me. And I can say to you, yes, I acknowledge like, you know, I acknowledge that the show isn't perfect, but it's like the first when you read the first bad review, the feeling that you have inside your body is just like I failed. This person is completely and totally right. I'm a fraud and also they're wrong. You know, the show is actually like all these contradictory feelings sort of like come into play. And so, I want to go deep. Watchmen was so dense, the Old Testament, that's how we internally referred to the 12 initial issues were so dense that our watchmen had to be equally dense. So when we talked about red gradations, we're like, at the end of the equal sign is the word red gradations. And so, what is the what's the provenance of that word? In the early 2000s, Johnny Cochrane representing several of the victims of Tulsa 21 and their descendants sued the state of Oklahoma on the grounds of what happened in 21. And it made it all the way up to I believe the Oklahoma State Supreme Court and it got tossed for reasons of standing. That actually happened in real life. They made the argument that the statute of limitations had run out and also that the descendants were not traumatized by the initial trauma. And so we basically said if Johnny Cochrane did the same thing in red fards America, maybe his Supreme Court would hear that case versus the real Supreme Court that didn't hear it. And when the Supreme Court decided to hear it, at that point, Congress realized if we don't legislate some form of reparations, we're about to bankrupt the country. Because this thing, the liberal Supreme Court is going to pass. You're going to mandate this. And so our compromise will will be that we're going to pay reparations for specific racial violence incidents. Not everyone. We're going to designate Tulsa and the Japanese in term and camps and lands taken away from Native Americans in Oklahoma and elsewhere, et cetera, et cetera. These very specific events and maybe that will make it go away. And so and that's how you ended up with the, you know, it became a tax exemption, a lifetime tax exemption for descendants of victims of the Tulsa massacre. If you could prove a genealogical connection to them, which you start to see in episode two, which is another example of how things meet together because you're starting to learn about red fardations, you're starting to learn about how the government is addressing the incident in Tulsa and other and other racial crimes. And maybe that's a pretty good segue into this, which is how you and your writers and your directors and your production designers and costumers planted 14 billion Easter eggs into these episodes for people who have read Watchmen and looked and studied the graphic novel. There are so many. I'm not going to try and articulate them. I'll just mention two of my favorites, the slight dash of red on the yolks that are making the smiley face and my favorite is favoritists. So no one has even said Dr. Manhattan's name I think until episode two. And when his name first comes up, there is a blue glow coming from a coffee machine that is very Dr. Manhattan. But there there are Easter eggs everywhere everywhere. How much time did you guys put into it? How much thought was it just a game to see how much you could get in or was each one carefully chosen? I think all of the above Nicole Cassel who directed the pilot and the second episode she was a Watchman neophyte. So when I first reached out to her about directing the pilot, she had bought the collected graphic novel but hadn't read it. And so she read the script, I think, for the pilot before she read any Watchmen. And I felt like that was really important because there were going to be people who are watching the pilot who had no preexisting relationship with Watchmen. And of a perfect choice in that regard. Absolutely. And she was the one who, you know, in the script, it would say Angela is doing these eggs and it's the form of a smiley face. But she is the one who put the little drop of red in there. She's the one who decided to put the blue light because she realized that the filmmaking couldn't be so self-aware that it was distracting to watch. But she also understood that like the original Watchmen, she wanted to reward the deep dive. There's richness. And I mean, that's one of the things about Watchmen and the graphic novel that I think you guys have brought through beautifully is how rich each panel was, how much information and detail. You kind of have to hit pause and go back. This show almost demands rewatching. And I when, you know, my dad gave me the first two issues of Watchmen when I was 13 years old. And I read them, I read one, I read the first one, and then I read the second one, and then I read the first one again, and the first one again, and the first one again. And it was a month in between, I had to wait for a month before the third one came out. And I just read them over and over again. And every time I read them, and Craig, we had Watchmen Book Club in the writer's room. So when we, when we first came together and we're doing our world building every three days, we would just, our homework would be to read an issue and to come in and we talk about it for three hours. And some of us had read Watchmen multiple times and some of us were reading it for the first time. And I was still discovering stuff and also discovering stuff through others interpretation the material. That's, that's because this is a masterpiece. It's a work of art. And so we were aspiring to that. And so, but at the same time, the first read is the only one that matters. If the degree of difficulty in getting through it, if it's so dense, then the experience of watching the show is like quicksand. And I hate television that makes me feel dumb. And I love television that makes me reach higher. And the line between those two things is, is razor thin. Because I love TV that like assumes that the audience is quite sophisticated because I believe that the audience is a lot more sophisticated than most people give them credit for. And so you treat the audience like they're super smart because they are. And then you write accordingly, that's the way you do it. And and I'll just say one other thing, which is that when we were doing lost, people would refer to all the east rugs that we were hiding in lost. And sort of like where'd you come up with this idea of Easter eggs? And I was like, first off, Twin Peaks did it, X files did it, Ailius did it, Joss Whedon did it on Buffy, that we didn't invent it. But the internet is starting to be a thing now around the time of lost. And so the the collective searching for Easter eggs, this is something we're all doing together felt like it was new for lost. But I learned all of that from Watchmen. I learned it all as a 13 year old. And so now coming back to the source is my opportunity to say to everybody, this is where I learned this. This is what taught me how to do this. Well, you are perfecting it. And I have no doubt that there's going to be at least a few websites that do nothing but just catalog Easter eggs. I want to get to, there you go, just a little taste. If you want more, the official Watchmen podcast is out now, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And of course, you can also listen to it on YouTube or HBO go, the HBO now apps, just like Chernobyl. Watchmen air Sunday nights at 9 PM on HBO and we'll have new episodes of the podcast for you after episodes three, six, and the finale air. I hope you join us. In the meantime, stay subscribed to this podcast because like I said, we will be back with more about Chernobyl. Thanks.