Watch The Tick Tock Teaser Trailer For HBO's 'Watchmen' Adaptation

With just two episodes left of Game Of Thrones dominating the cultural conversation, it's unclear what—if anything—might replace the incest & dragons saga as the biggest genre show on TV. But one possibility HBO is hoping for is that Damon Lindelof's much-anticipated adaptation of Watchmen will fill that gap. And based on the first teaser trailer, which you can see below, it certainly looks like it will be worthy of feverish speculation and coverage.

"We are no one. We are everyone. And we are invisible." This show immediately gets one thing right: there's no such thing as too many Rorschachs! The most important thing to know about the series is that unlike Zack Snyder's 2009 movie, this is not a direct adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's cult classic comic book series—rather, it imagines the world after the events of the comic, opening up way more narrative possibilities and sidestepping the problems of slavish recreation that affected the film.

Here's what Lindelof had to say about how his adaptation differs from the original:

Those issues are sacred ground and they will not be retread nor recreated nor reproduced nor rebooted. They will, however, be remixed. Because the bass lines in those familiar tracks are just too good and we’d be fools not to sample them. Those original twelve issues are our Old Testament. When the New Testament came along it did not erase what came before it. Creation. The Garden of Eden. Abraham and Isaac. The Flood. It all happened. And so it will be with Watchmen. The Comedian died. Dan and Laurie fell in love. Ozymandias saved the world and Dr. Manhattan left it just after blowing Rorschach to pieces in the bitter cold of Antarctica.

This story will be set in the world its creators painstakingly built… but in the tradition of the work that inspired it, this new story must be original. It has to vibrate with the seismic unpredictability of its own tectonic plates. It must ask new questions and explore the world through a fresh lens. Most importantly, it must be contemporary. The Old Testament was specific to the Eighties of Reagan and Thatcher and Gorbachev. Ours needs to resonate with the frequency of Trump and May and Putin and the horse that he rides around on, shirtless. And speaking of Horsemen, The End of the World is off the table, which means the heroes and villains - as if the two are distinguishable - are playing for different stakes entirely. Some of the characters will be unknown. New faces. New masks to cover them. We also intend to revisit the past century of Costumed Adventuring through a surprising yet familiar set of eyes... And it is here we will be taking our greatest risks.

The show's cast includes Regina King, Jeremy Irons (as an older Ozymandias), Don Johnson, Jean Smart, Tim Blake Nelson, Louis Gossett Jr., Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Hong Chau, Andrew Howard, Tom Mison, Frances Fisher, Jacob Ming-Trent, Sara Vickers, Dylan Schombing, and James Wolk.

Nelson, who plays a new character called "Looking Glass," previously said that he thought fans of the original would be pleased by the updates: "Damon Lindelof...is doing something that I think Alan Moore actually will appreciate, which is that he's treating the Watchmen novel as a history book, and he's imagining the world created by the Watchmen now," he explained. "And he's using that as a prism through which to examine a lot of issues currently on the surface of American culture and politics."

The show, which is Lindelof's followup to his masterful HBO series The Leftovers, will debut on HBO in the fall of 2019.