In HBO’s ‘Watchman,’ Damon Lindelof is opening up exactly how different things will be on Earth after Nixon has been President for so many years in this alternate timeline. Not only will things have evolved in a way where the Internet doesn’t exist, but we also ended up having a very liberal celebrity president in the ’90s instead of Ronald Reagan being elected in 1980.
According to Lindelof:
“Robert Redford is the President of the United States and has been the President in the world of the show since the early ’90s since they’ve abolished term limits. We’re interested in exploring what would happen if a very well-intentioned liberal white man was President for way too long. Nixon was still President in ’85. He remained President, was re-elected in ’88. He died in office. Gerald Ford became President as Nixon’s Vice President and then was defeated in ’92 by Robert Redford.”
With Robert Redford being the President here you have to wonder who ended up playing Alexander Pierce in this world’s version of ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ and ‘Avengers: Endgame.’
However, don’t expect this to be a perfect world scenario for the Democrats who are angry about the current administration as one of the major focus points will still be racial violence:
“Personally speaking as a white man, the idea that systemically our country would ever come to a place where there wasn’t an incredible amount of anger, pushback, and vitriol about balancing the power scale between people of color and white people would be ridiculous. Nobody would ever swallow that. We’re trying to reflect where well-intentioned white people are trying to make things better, and we’re now dropping the audience into the unintended consequences of that intentionality.”
Another significant change is that there isn’t an Internet:
“We’ve created a world that does not have an internet, People do not have smart phones. Even though it’s set in 2019, the Redford administration saw the writing on the wall and stepped in to make sure we could not troll each other.
As a parent of a 12-year-old, the thing we talk about most amongst our peers is what effect is social media and screens having on our culture, That worry is embedded deeply in the thematics of the show.”
The bonus is that we will be following the comics as being canon:
“We’re not going to mess with it. It’s canon. We re-explore the past, but it’s canon. [That’s] one of the rules that we had as storytellers, writers. Even once we got into production, everything that happened in those 12 issues could not be messed with. We were married to it, so there’s no rebooting that.”
Are you looking forward to ‘Watchmen’? What do you think of the new details for the series? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Source: Slash Film
