Being a Religious Man Might Help Right Now

Very rarely do the people who watch the culture, watch the films, and who watch the cultural revolutions occurring all around us, get an unalloyed victory.

This garbage should never have been greenlit in the first place.

And then, we read news like this, from the trades:

But don’t look for the second season of the drama, which wrapped up its nine-episode run last month, largely because creator Damon Lindelof isn’t interested in doing it. Lindelof told USA TODAY this week that he’s told the story he wants to tell and has no interest in a second season, though he’s “given my blessing” to HBO should it want to pursue a new installment with another writer-producer.

What? What is this?

From the trades:

“It’s really in Damon’s thinking about what he wants to do. If there’s an idea that excited him about another season, another installment, maybe like a ‘Fargo,’ ‘True Detective‘ (anthology) take on it, or if he wants to do something different altogether. We’re very proud of ‘Watchmen,’ but what I’m most interested in what Damon wants to do.” But Bloys concedes that’s unlikely to happen: “It would be hard to imagine doing it without Damon involved in some way.”

People, Lindelof is like once of those Whack-A-Mole games: He always pops up at a certain point, but for right now, he’s moved on from ruining Watchmen.

How Do We Get More Creators to Be One and Done?

The question of the moment is how do we, as viewers, consumers, etc., get more ideologically driven, radical, post-modernist “creators” to be one and done: Come in, do damage of a limited fashion, and then move on to the next thing?

Well…BYE!

HBO, and other content distributors, are corporations and they lack creativity. The HBO flakey even admitted that they don’t have the creative juice to lift the second season of this claptrap and it’s not even quality. 

Increasingly, with the rise of streaming services, where algorithmic decisions about quality and creativity can be successfully outsourced to the machine while allowing the human to avoid responsibility, the political and philosophical positioning of content creators are going to present a larger and larger problem as the future unwinds.

What Are We To Make of All of This?

Watchmen, as a comic book property, resists interpretation in a post-modern, social justice focused manner. Lindelof–captured by the half-baked ideologically driven ravings of Ta-Nehisi Coates–sought to lecture, to hector, and to warp the core Watchmen material to fit a political and philosophical motive that he personally holds dear.

Neither one of them are that bright. But they are activists.

It is long past time to hold creators accountable by rejecting their thesis about the structure of the reality of core content and to pressure the content distributors into making different decisions about what they greenlight.

For the time being though, Lindelof has moved on away from Alan Moore’s magnum opus.