Lost and Star Trek: Into the Darkness screenwriter Damon Lindelof looks just about set to tackle the comic book adaptation Watchmen as a TV series for HBO.

Related: Watchmen related news

Lindelof is currently in talks with HBO to serve as an executive producer/showrunner to bring the story to life for the small screen after their first attempt at a miniseries in 2014 lost traction. The new venture into the DC comic looks set to start from scratch with any work on the first attempt to be completely scrapped giving Lindeloff free reign to let his creative juices flow.

Back in 2009, Zack Synder took the helm on the feature length Watchmen which had a cast that included Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson, Billy Crudup but the series is said to have no relation to the feature. The film was a darkly satirical and dystopian take on the superhero genre, the film is set in an alternate history in the year 1985 at the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, as a group of mostly retired American superheroes investigates the murder of one of their own before uncovering an elaborate and deadly conspiracy, while their moral limitations are challenged by the complex nature of the circumstances.

Watchmen

With HBO declining to comment thus far on the news no other details are available as to plot or format for the new show.

Let’s hope this version can at least gather some momentum, what with HBO’s previous attempt at trying to get the series off the ground, numerous live action adaptations have failed to come to fruition.  Between October 1987 and October 2005, an adaptation of the Watchmen series became stranded in development hell; Producer Lawrence Gordon began developing the project at 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros., the parent company of Watchmen publisher DC Comics, with producer Joel Silver and director Terry Gilliam, with the latter, eventually deeming the complex comic “un-filmable”