The tagline of the HBO TV series Watchmen, which premieres Sunday, Oct. 20, is “Nothing Ever Ends.” It’s a clever reference to one of the final lines of dialogue in the original comic book series by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, and a winking acknowledgement to the endless remakes and adaptations of comic-book properties. After all, Watchmen was made into a movie once already—and badly. But this new show, created by Damon Lindelof of Lost and The Leftovers fame, feels more like a new beginning.

Watchmen was first published as a single-volume graphic novel in 1987, and it went on to win a Hugo Award—one of the greatest honors for a work of speculative fiction. In 2010, Time Magazine named it one of the 100 best novels—not just graphic novels but all novels—published since 1923. Its story offered a grim and gritty deconstruction of superhero mythology, set in an alternate-history version of 1985, in which costumed vigilantes have been outlawed. As a result, several of them, including the Batman-like Nite Owl (aka Dan Dreiberg) and Silk Spectre (Laurie Juspeczyk), simply retired, while others, such as the amoral Comedian (Edward Blake) and the seemingly omnipotent Dr. Manhattan (Jon Osterman)—the only being on Earth with actual superpowers—went to work for the U.S. government. Another former crime-fighter, the brilliant Ozymandias (Adrian Veidt), became a successful businessman, while the brutal, violent Rorschach (Walter Kovacs) continued to pursue his own brand of justice.

In the original story, the Comedian is murdered in his own apartment, and Rorschach is determined to figure out who did it and why, seeking the help of his former vigilante teammates. It all connects to a grand plan by Ozymandias to fake an alien invasion in New York City—and kill millions of people—in order to unite humanity and avert a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union; in this, Ozymandias is successful.

The Watchmen TV series doesn’t retell this tale; that was done in 2009, in a Zack Snyder-directed film version that changed some details—most egregiously, the ending. Instead, the show is set 34 years after the events of the original novel, and takes place primarily in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The central character, Angela Abar, played by Oscar-winner Regina King, works for the local police as vigilante Sister Night. She’s not in the original novel, which is primarily about men—and white men, at that, aside from the blue-tinged Dr. Manhattan (who’s also white, before he gets his powers). The Emmy- and Tony Award-winning actor Jean Smart plays a character from the original story, but in the TV series she has far more authority and agency—and far more to do.

Like the book, the series is deeply concerned with what drives someone to hide his identity. In its version of 2019 Tulsa, professional policemen hide their faces behind masks to avoid identification by members of an anti-cop, right-wing, racist terrorist group call the 7th Kavalry—who also wear masks. This prompts Smart’s character to ask, “You know how you can tell the difference between a masked cop and a vigilante?...Me neither.”

Another FBI agent calls the 7th Kavalry “the Klan with different masks”—and, in a canny move, Lindelof makes their disguises look just like Rorschach’s. Moore has said in interviews that he intended Rorschach as a deeply disturbed, “extremely right-wing” character, whose politics he definitely did not share; he also once revealed that the tone of Rorschach’s diary “was inspired by the letters [of] Son of Sam David Berkowitz.” Even so, some fans of Watchmen found Rorschach sympathetic, and even heroic; the TV series, in a brave move, remedies this misaimed fandom by making Rorschach the hero of racist killers.

Indeed, racist violence in America is a key theme of the show. The first scene of the first episode portrays the real-life Tulsa race riot of 1921, during which whites murdered hundreds of black residents and burned and looted homes and businesses, leaving thousands homeless. In the show’s chilling recreation, two black parents manage to smuggle their young son out of the city in a sequence that fascinatingly recalls the origin of Superman—whose mother and father placed him in a spaceship to save him from Krypton’s fiery destruction.

The black child’s later life is revealed in a later episode that’s a tour de force of the flashback form—which is perhaps unsurprising, coming from a co-creator of the flashback-heavy Lost. A recurring, and compelling, theme of the Watchmen show is how racism is deeply entwined with American history—and this strongly connects with the novel’s concerns about how authority and violence go hand-in-hand.

For those who haven’t read the book, though, the show does a good job of recapping past events. For example, characters watch a TV docudrama, American Hero Story, which acts as a crash course in costumed-vigilante history. And there are several brand-new characters, such as Looking Glass, played by Tim Blake Nelson—a real-life Tulsa native who gives a consistently riveting performance, even when his features are obscured behind an unsettling, reflective mask. King, too, plays a newly minted character, and she brings a fierce determination to her role.

Some of Moore and Gibbons’ characters do make appearances, of course, but Lindelof—who wrote or co-wrote every episode—smoothly provides their backstories along the way. Oscar-winner Jeremy Irons, for instance, brings his signature coldness to a key player from the source material, and a third Academy Award recipient, Louis Gossett Jr., brings a deft playfulness to an initially mysterious figure.

Like the novel that inspired it, the Watchmen TV series is a thoughtful meditation on heroes and villains, good and evil, identity and anonymity. But even as the show examines old notions of truth, justice, and the American Way, nothing about it feels like a retread. Instead, it feels shockingly new.

Earlier this month, at New York Comic Con, Lindelof said that the first season of the show was intended to be a complete, self-contained story—implying that there may not be a second season in the future. Judging from the first six episodes, it would be a shame to see this ambitious series end.

But then again, nothing ever ends.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.