Watchmen’s Regina King and Jean Smart Win Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress at Critics’ Choice Awards

HBO’s Watchmen is getting some major love at tonight’s 25th Annual Critics’ Choice Awards. Jean Smart took home the prize for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series while Regina King won for Best Actress in a Drama Series. Smart played Laurie Blake, the former second Silk Specter turned FBI agent and member of the Anti-Vigilante Task Force while King played Angela Abar/Sister Night, a Tulsa police detective whose family and story ends up being central to the series’ events.

The awards are two of four Watchmen was nominated for, the others being Best Drama Series and Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for Tim Blake Nelson, though that award went to The Morning Show‘s Billy Crudup.

With Awards Season in full swing, HBO’s Watchmen has been getting quite a bit of award love. The series was recently nominated for multiple prizes at the NAACP Image Awards and even beyond Awards Season the series, which aired its season finale last month has received a lot of critical praise as well for not only its approach to the iconic comic book it draws on for its general setting but also for its handling of complex issues such as race and injustice.

It’s not yet clear if HBO plans to renew the show for a second season, but King has said that she is open to returning and reprising her role as Angela Abar, provided a second season is as “emotionally driven” as the first.

“I would totally do a season two, but I would just want it to be just as emotionally driven as season one. And that’s a tall order. So I would just want it to be on par with that,” King said in a recent interview. “I can say that I would want to come back if it could be anything near season one.”

Series creator and showrunner Damon Lindelof had previously said he’d love to return if they could come up with an adequate story. On the flip side, Lindelof said he’d also gladly part ways should someone else manage to come up with a better idea.

“If the idea is right, and if there is a compelling reason to do it, then I’d consider it,” Lindelof said earlier this fall. “I haven’t had that idea yet. The other thing about Watchmen is that it doesn’t belong to me. Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins created this thing. I had the opportunity to be its steward for a couple of years. There is going to be more Watchmen, independently of whether I do it. It should be done by someone who really deeply cares about it and has a reason to.”