The Lost showrunner is bringing Alan Moore’s classic to the cable channel next year – and the superfans are already moaning about it. But could they be jumping the gun?

HBO’s new Watchmen series is going to make a lot of people very angry. The whole thing is loaded with red flags: it’s an adaptation of a beloved comic book, the comic book’s creator is notorious for being opposed to any adaptations of his work and the series will take several unforgivable liberties with the text. This alone should ensure that it will be greeted with more roiling, seething below-the-line fanboy spite than anything else on TV.

But that’s not all. The biggest red flag is something else: the HBO Watchmen series is being written by Damon Lindelof.

Lindelof is the man responsible for Lost and therefore the man responsible for the Lost finale, and therefore the man who ruined television for ever. He wrote Prometheus, so he ruined Alien. He wrote Star Trek: Into Darkness, too, so there’s an argument that he is also indirectly responsible for ruining the entire 1960s. People hate Lindelof. Specifically, they hate him for taking the things they love and flushing them down the toilet. With Lindelof at the helm, fan consensus dictates that Watchmen is going to be a train wreck.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Damon Lindelof is planning to ‘remix’ Watchmen to the chagrin of some fans. Photograph: Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for Vulture festival

However, to present an opposing view, I will be watching Watchmen. And I will only be watching Watchmen because of Lindelof. I don’t think there’s a single person on the face of the planet who would do a better job with it.

People have struggled with adapting Watchmen before. In the 90s, Terry Gilliam failed to get a Watchmen movie off the ground. Darren Aronofsky stalled, too, as did Paul Greengrass. And when Zack Snyder’s Watchmen film ended up in cinemas in 2009, it was a mess. Crucially, it was a mess because it was afraid to deviate from the source material. By sticking to the comic book as closely as possible, the film ended up being overlong and weirdly paced; a mishmash of tones that worked on page, but fell apart on screen.

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But Lindelof isn’t making a straight adaptation. He is using Watchmen as a launchpad for his own thing. This will be a “remix” of the comic book in the same way that Noah Hawley remixed the Coen brothers for the Fargo series. It will be set in the same world, but feature new characters and storylines. And, while this is bound to inspire all manner of wounded howls from diehard Watchmen fans, my guess is that it will be the truest on-screen iteration of Watchmen yet.

Lindelof soars when his adaptations move beyond canon. Take The Leftovers, for example. At the start, it was a relatively faithful adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s 2011 post-rapture novel. It was fine, but so oppressively gloomy to sit through that you could never really get excited about it. But, once Lindelof had freed himself from the shackles of the text in series two and three, The Leftovers became his masterpiece. Perrotta’s characters were still there and his book’s core emotion was left intact, but in Lindelof’s hands it flowered into something far richer and weirder.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest His dark material: Watchmen creator Alan Moore. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

It was still a meditation on grief, but one that opened itself up enough to recognise the moments of absurdity that come with bereavement. On paper, some of the flights of fancy that Lindelof took – the penis scanner, for example, or the lion orgy – sound too far-fetched to work. But in the moment, they felt even truer to the book than the direct adaptation did. Lindelof was doodling in the margins, but in a way that honoured the source. I am certain that this is what he will do with Watchmen, too.

Of course, a few things stand in his way. Perrotta worked on The Leftovers as a writer, so he was always at hand to yank Lindelof back down to earth whenever he threatened to overstep the mark, but this won’t happen with Watchmen. Moore’s presence will be felt, but only as an unseen, disapproving force. He wants no say in the direction of the series, which means that Lindelof will have to rely on his own instincts to remain moored to the spirit of the book.

Second, and perhaps more important, Lindelof has to contend with the uppity possessiveness of Watchmen fans. He has already got out in front of this a little – back in May before the series was greenlit, he wrote a long essay about his history with Watchmen partly to prove his credentials and partly to prostrate himself before the fans – but he only needs to enrage the neediest of Watchmen superfans to make his life a misery. Why anyone would risk putting themselves through that is anyone’s guess.

But I believe in Lindelof, and I believe that his Watchmen series will be funnier, sadder, weirder and scarier than the book. And if it isn’t? I’ll just watch the Lost finale 10 times in a row instead because you were all wrong about that as well.