HBO to Offer Watchmen Episodes for Free for Limited Time

HBO’s Watchmen is easily one of the most powerful series of the last couple of years, which was further proven by the fact that it recently won a Peabody Award. The series, which takes place 30 years after the comic of the same name, is currently more timely than ever. The fact that the series begins with the Tulsa Race Massacre and continues with themes of police brutality and racism, the show is especially relevant during the current Black Lives Matter movement. In fact, HBO recently announced that the show will soon be made available to watch for free in light of current events.

From Friday, June 19th (also known as Juneteenth) through Sunday, June 21st, you can watch all nine episodes of the series for free exclusively on HBO.com and Free on Demand. According to HBO, this is “an extension of the network’s content offering highlighting Black experiences, voices and storytellers.” The network will also air a marathon of the episodes on HBO and HBO Latino starting at 1:00 PM EST on Friday. You can read a description of the series below:

“Set in an alternate history where masked vigilantes are treated as outlaws, Peabody Award winner WATCHMEN, starring Regina King and from executive producer Damon Lindelof, embraces the nostalgia of the original groundbreaking graphic novel of the same name, while attempting to break new ground of its own.”

Most of the parallels between Watchmen and current events were likely not things that anyone could have predicted when the show debuted or even when Lindelof first sat down to work on it. Still, it certainly makes the approach of centering the story around America’s real story of inequality all the more timely.

“I think that it sort of all comes back to what I believed and what many of the people who worked on the show believe Watchmen to be,” Lindelof recently told ComicBook.com. “I think as a huge fan of comic books my entire life, the reason that… I was around 13 years old was that it was the first comic book that dealt with what we would call here in the real world actual historical events. If you take Superman or Batman or The Flash or Green Lantern or any of the DC characters, they all occupy fictional places like Metropolis or Gotham City or Central City, et cetera. Certainly, the Marvel Universe incorporates New York City, but the idea of dealing with actual presidents like Nixon or the Vietnam War or the assassination of JFK, those are all things that don’t really exist in comic books, but yet existed in Watchmen.”

Will you be watching Watchmen this weekend? Tell us in the comments!