You don't have to read this stuff in order to enjoy 'Watchmen' but I think you really should.

I've really been enjoying the Watchmen television series, and think it's done a fabulous job of treating the source material with respect while building exciting new tales from the original DNA. Heh, that sentence could be viewed as darkly humorous given a few of the plot development s in last night's episode. But I digress.

In the original comic book, there was always supplementary material at the back of the book in the form of book excerpts, articles, and the like. For the TV series, the creators originally wanted to do something is similar, and build post-credit sequences that would serve a similar purpose. However they couldn't find a way to make it quite work within the show. So I believe that's what spurred the creation of the Peteypedia files, a collection similar in purpose to the additional material in the comics. It's the sort of thing that can expand your understanding of what's happening in there main story, but isn't essential.

Here is where you make the argument that the show must stand on its own, without additional required reading, and this is certainly true. When 14-year-old me read the original series as it was being released—I worked in a comic book store in the mid-'80s, marking me a super uber nerd*—I admit I often skipped the "boring stuff" at the back of the book. It wasn't until re-reading Watchmen a few years later, probably bored in my college dorm room and avoiding homework, that I pored over the extra stuff and realized just how much color it added to the story!

The Peteypedia files do the exact same thing.

They release "new" files each week, and while they aren't essential to the central story, they do add to it, and it continues to show what a fully considered world Damon Lindelof and his collaborators have created. Everything here means something, and the attention to detail (and ability to not take everything so seriously**) really does make for fuller immersion into a world so foreign and familiar.

In other words, like the original, HBO's Watchmen stands on its own, but why not take advantage of the expanded world both versions offer in order to create an even richer experience?


*Not as much of a nerd as my coworker at the time who pegged who the villain was in Watchmen before anyone else.

**Also, how else would you learn that Ezra Klein is the White House press secretary for Robert Redford? Tell me that isn't pretty funny stuff.