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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
33
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Oct 21, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Ambitious, imaginative, provocative and engrossing. ... A triumph of style and substance, it never sacrifices pace for preaching or pontificating. At least in the first six episodes made available to critics, it remains every bit as entertaining as it is intriguing.
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Oct 20, 2019
Season 1 Review:
An inspired, riveting continuation of the seminal comic book series co-created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons first published between 1986 and 1987...What Lindelof has achieved in the six episodes of Watchmen provided for review is extraordinary for its execution alone. It is dark, but it’s also exciting; grim, but also invigorating. The action sequences are stunning, as are the performances. King is a mesmerizing presence, as is Louis Gossett, Jr.
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The Daily BeastOct 19, 2019
Oct 18, 2019
Season 1 Review:
A lavish, transfixing epic, a potent but rarely heavy-handed metaphor for race relations in America and a showcase for one of the greatest actors of her generation, Lindelof’s Watchmen is also a shrewd encapsulation of the perils that might await a society obsessed with superheroes.
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Oct 17, 2019
Season 1 Review:
HBO’s drop-dead fantastic new series “Watchmen” is many things at once — a righteously topical, thrillingly conceived riff on race and criminal justice set in an allegorical USA of vigilante cops, shady superheroes and subversive domestic terrorists. It’s fabulous and flammable and feels exactly right.
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IndieWireOct 15, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The series’ scope is astonishing given its subject matter, and even more so given its relentless entertainment value. Through six episodes, “Watchmen” has already provided a bounty of intelligent theories to study and debate, but it’s designed to be one helluva good time, as well.
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Oct 15, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Told through a complex and riveting mystery, a murder investigation is at the center of “Watchmen’s” first season. It’s up to Angela Abar/Sister Night to do the unraveling. King balances her divergent roles as mother, wife, friend and vigilante with a mix of grace, sincere affection and ferocity. ... After an unevenly paced premiere episode, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this new series. But after episode two I was all in.
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Oct 15, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Like The Leftovers, it’s a vividly felt tale of generational sorrow, tapping deeper weirdness and structural experimentation as it goes along. Watchmen doesn’t overdose on nostalgia, like so many franchise extensions in our reboot-soaked decade. It’s dangerous, and invigorating. Like the proverbial Space Squid, it blew my mind.
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Oct 21, 2019
Season 1 Review:
When Watchmen is at its most humane, its most imaginative (as it is in the sixth episode, “This Extraordinary Being”), it feels like superlative television. The breadth of its vision, coupled with Lindelof’s imperative to poke at the relationship between nostalgia for the past and destruction in the present, make for storytelling that vibrates with urgency and insight.
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The GuardianDec 3, 2019
Season 1 Review:
It is a bravura series that interrogates power, storytelling and the former embedded in the latter. It has a (still unusually) diverse cast, writing team and cohort of directors in terms of both sex and class, and, even as it strays from Moore and Gibbons’ original content, it honours their underlying ambition: to deconstruct our legends and our myths, ask where they come from, what purpose they serve; and to make us think and think again about who tells us what, why – and why they are the ones who get to do so.
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Oct 18, 2019
Season 1 Review:
He’s packing a punch. Watchmen is a show that will be scoured for clues about yet-to-be-birthed fan theories, even as it’s an intrinsic provocation of the sorts of genre fans who were angered by Star Wars centering women and people of color, or outraged by the suggestion that certain superheroes, James Bond, or Hermione Granger might be black. It’s not just that Watchmen’s main character is a black woman, it’s how the new show reframes what came before it.
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Oct 17, 2019
Season 1 Review:
In the first five episodes, “Watchmen” feels more loose and comfortable the farther it gets from the racial-history marker it sets down in its opening minutes. It doesn’t deeply reckon with the implications of the Tulsa massacre until the sixth, written by Lindelof and Cord Jefferson. But that hour (the last screened for critics) is a wallop, synthesizing past and alt-present in a stylistic tour de force.
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Oct 21, 2019
Season 1 Review:
If you’ve never read the comics or you didn’t see the movie, some of the references are going to fly by unnoticed, and it’s going to be a challenge to keep up with all the new developments without knowing about the past events that led to all of this. Still, regardless of your depth of knowledge about this universe, certain episodes stand alone as strikingly effective set pieces.
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Oct 15, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The cast is owed a lot of credit for keeping the momentum going and the series grounded. ... Though its messaging gets muddled—especially in the sixth episode, which should raise the question of whether some symbols are too entrenched in violent, racist history to ever be repurposed or otherwise subverted—Watchmen is commendably bold in its dive into this country’s fraught past and present.
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TV Guide MagazineNov 6, 2019
Season 1 Review:
You may not always be sure what you're watching, but good luck taking your eyes off Watchmen. [28 Oct - 10 Nov 2019, p.8]
Oct 16, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Beyond the embellishments and reimaginings of the source material, the biggest hurdle this Watchmen will face is the way it tells its story. Although each chapter has the feel of a stand-alone, à la The Leftovers, it’s ultimately a highly serialized tale, though one that takes its sweet time easing you into its world and making you work to understand who’s who and what’s actually happening. It’s easy to imagine viewers who aren’t already invested in the very idea of a Watchmen sequel growing impatient with the show’s gradual doling out of exposition.
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Oct 18, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The series expands the comic in some fascinating ways, weaving a dense, bizarre mythology and a richly conceived world to get swept up in. The pilot episode in particular introduces various complicated ideas, drawing clear lines to fascism in the actions of the police and vigilantes. But the series misses some of the novel’s complexity in its eagerness for loaded imagery—lynchings, riots, police violence—and slowly-unfolding mysteries.
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Oct 15, 2019
Season 1 Review:
To tackle the meanness and violence of history in a truly serious way — with superheroes or with mere magnificently brave mortals telling the story — demands a focus “Watchmen” simply lacks, and attempts to make up for with a tone of increasing dudgeon. What “Watchmen” sets out to do, taking the opportunity of an artwork perceived as unadaptable and writing a whole new story, is admirable. But both that original artwork and, more crucially, this story deserve better.
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