Watchmen and the golden era of the single-season series

Enlarge / A small army of Rorschachs. (credit: YouTube/HBO)

HBO's choice to adapt two critically acclaimed book series, Game of Thrones and Watchmen, may seem like a case of two peas in a pod. They're game-changing works in their respective fields with cult followings and "unadaptable" reputations.

But GoT and Watchmen differ in a key respect: where they sit on the "epic television" spectrum. Arguably, both examples prove, in very different ways, that TV series needn't last multiple seasons to be considered "great."

When Game of Thrones ended in May of this year, a small cottage industry of worriers fretted that this was somehow the end of HBO. But the channel is already back with a new high-profile series, inspired by Alan Moore's comic classic Watchmen. Showrunner Damon Lindelof insists that, like its source comic, he plans to stick to a "limited series" run, instead of any intention to run the series for multiple seasons.

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