One of the best things to come out of 2019 was HBO's "Watchmen," a nine-part miniseries that put its own special spin on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' 1986 comic. The normal, expected thing for a show like this to do was to adapt the original story, but showrunner Damon Lindelof chose to give us something completely new. The show is not quite a sequel, nor is it a spin-off; the best way to describe it is probably as a "Watchmen" remix.

The results were pretty stunning. Unlike the Zack Snyder film adaptation, the show understood that Alan Moore's radical political commentary was a crucial element of the comics' enduring success, and that any follow-up story set in the universe should also try to seriously critique the world around it. The 2019 show explores racism and reparations in a version of America that had been run for 25 years by liberal president Robert Redford...