The Peabody awards were announced on Wednesday and Damon Lindelof’s adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons 1987 comic book
Watchmen (
watch here) was honoured in the Entertainment category. The cast was led by the incomparable Regina King, who along with Lindelof accepted the award at home while isolating. At least, we are pretty sure she’s isolating. If King wants to put on a mask and hood and save us all, we are okay with that as well.King and Lindelof delivered beautiful and impassioned speeches for their latest honour, thanking their fellow cast and crew members who helped bring their inventive twist on history and comic book storytelling to life.“To receive this award from such a prestigious organization means so much,” said King. “This show not only evoked thought and conversation, but exposed history that had been forgotten all while we were able to entertain.”“Tulsa became the foundation of a new interpretation of
Watchmen, reframing the traditional superhero origin story, born not from the aftermath of an exploding fictional planet but from the ashes of a very real place in Oklahoma that was erased from history 100 years ago,” added Lindelof. “It is in the memory of the lost lives of Greenwood, not victims, but mothers and sons and fathers and daughters and doctors and lawyers and journalists and veterans, that we dedicate this award.”
King and Lindelof are referring to the horrific
1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which resulted in upwards of 300 deaths, mainly Black residents, as well as the destruction of 35 city blocks containing thriving Black businesses, churches, schools and homes in the Greenwood District. Largely ignored in history books, the massacre included over 6,000 Black citizens being held under arrest for more than a week. When they were eventually released, up to 10,000 residents found themselves homeless. Reparations for the burned homes and businesses were never provided and Tulsa’s thriving Black neighborhoods did not recover. Lindelof was
inspired to write about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre after reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2014 essay “
The Case for Reparations,” which first appeared in
The Atlantic.[video_embed id='1973293']RELATED: Michael B. Jordan, J.Lo and more stars attend BLM marches over the weekend [/video_embed]Praising the groundbreaking series, which currently has a 95 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the
Peabody Awards said that
Watchmen “provides new answers to classic genre questions such as what it means to mask one’s identity and who gets to be a superhero, but more than that, it offers a frank and provocative reflection on contemporary racialized violence, on the role of police, and on the consequences of a large-scale disaster on the way Americans understand their place in the world.”Lindelof has publicly stated that there will likely not be a second season to the critically acclaimed series, which starred Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Andrew Howard, Jacob Ming-Trent, Tom Mison, Sara Vickers, Dylan Schombing, Louis Gossett Jr., Jeremy Irons, Jean Smart and Hong Chau alongside King. Thankfully, the door is not fully closed. In March, Lindelof told
Collider that if an idea presents itself, he will revisit the series. “I wish that I had an idea for
Watchmen Season 2, and I really wish that there is going to be a
Watchmen Season 2; I just – we put it all on the field for Season 1,” said Lindelof. “And so, could there be a second season of
Watchmen? I personally hope that there is but I don’t think it should exist just because people liked the first season.”In addition to
Watchmen, the Peabody Awards also honored
Succession, Chernobyl and
Ramy (
all available on Crave), as well as
David Makes Man, Dickinson, Fleabag, Molly of Denali, Stranger Things,
Unbelievable and
When They See Us.[video_embed id='1974196']BEFORE YOU GO: Kerry Washington’s wise words about the Black Lives Matter movement [/video_embed]
