At the very least, HBO’s series Watchmen, debuting October 20, is bold. The television drama is a sequel to the seminal 12-part comic book series of the same name, from writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, which went on to become a multiple-award winning classic. A comic book that examines the culture of comic books, Watchmen is the ne plus ultra of superhero stories—deconstructive, anti-establishment, and antihero, in ways that have become central to our culture’s obsession with the superhero myth.

But more than that, Watchmen is so brilliantly written, visually stunning, and structurally fine-tuned that it’s practically peerless. The combination of very good and very important makes it nearly impossible to adapt. Terry Gilliam tried and gave up, concluding that there was too much material to fit into a feature. In 2009, Zack Snyder adapted it into a faithful but uncompelling film, which seemed to kill any further Hollywood enthusiasm for the book. It does not help that Moore—who, in addition to being a celebrated British writer, is a bearded practitioner of the occult—has entirely cut ties with the comic industry, going so far as to refuse royalties for adaptations based on his work. Moore created the world we’re looking at, but in the opening credits for HBO’s Watchmen, only Gibbons is credited.

Creator and showrunner Damon Lindelof—best known for the paranoiac smash hit Lost and the post-rapture drama The Leftovers—handled these complications by pushing the book into the show’s hindsight. HBO’s series treats the comic book as history, and sails past the ending to drop the viewer 30 years further into the future. It’s a canny strategy—both making the source material indispensably canon, but also distancing an unadaptable text from a new experiment In a Hollywood drowning in reboots and revivals, this strategy works refreshingly well: You will be handsomely rewarded if you’ve read the graphic novel, but it’s far enough in the past that you don’t really have to. Watchmen, the series, stands on its own—and it’s delving into themes that are, for better or worse, only tangential to what the comic explored.

So, it’s 2019. An unseen Robert Redford is president, and one of the first things he did, we’re told, is sign reparations for black Americans into law. Vietnam is a state. Squid, perhaps from another dimension, occasionally rain from the sky. And the cops in Tulsa, Oklahoma all wear masks to protect themselves from retribution, largely from white supremacists. Their firearms are locked into their holsters and can’t be released unless a third party, like the dispatcher, buzzes it free for them. And they work with masked vigilantes. Regina King plays Angela, an ex-cop who turned into the badass crimefighter Sister Night. Her fellow heroes are all in Tulsa, too: Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson), who in every way reads as an updated version of the comic’s ruthless Rorshach, brawling Red Scare (Andrew Howard), the mysterious super-scientist Lady Trieu (Hong Chau), and more. It’s never quite explained why all these heroes are here—including Dan Dreiberg’s Owlship!—but it’s good they are, because Tulsa is facing a coordinated attack from white supremacists, who have adopted a version of Rorshach’s mask as their own.

But to remind us of the horrible details of our true history, the first episode of Watchmen opens on a pogrom—the real 1921 Tulsa race massacre, where it’s estimated over 1,200 buildings and between one hundred and three hundred African-Americans died at the hands of an armed white mob. The flashes of violence, as witnessed by a little boy named William (Danny Boyd Jr.), are some of the most sickening scenes I’ve seen on TV—including, in an image that haunts William, two men bound at their ankles being dragged behind a car. When the series moves forward to the present day, the stain of white supremacy confronts the characters at every turn, from the underground, plotting Rorshachs to KKK uniforms squirreled away in closets. Antiblack racism has an entirely incidental role to the comic books’ story; the TV series drags it out of subtext to make it central to the Watchmen story.

This kind of reframing can make for really compelling television, and at times, Watchmen makes the most of its skin-curdling window into America’s hidden past. But the show becomes detrimentally wrapped up in the drama of policing—an important topic, to be sure, but one that has been all but exhausted on television. Even its vigilantes are cops—specialized, undercover cops who use a lot of unauthorized force. When former masked superhero Laurie Blake (an exceptionally well-cast Jean Smart) shows up, she’s not just a cop, but a mega-cop—a high-ranking FBI agent, wearing not a leotard but a suit. In the six episodes released to critics of the nine-episode season, the show dives deep into Angela’s relationship to her police captain Judd (Don Johnson) and unfolds a second policing plot in a different location. At its best, the plot nudges the viewer towards the deep, very real fear that law and order is unraveling; that policing might be literally impossible in such a racially divided world. At its worst, the story rings and re-rings the same bells, uncovering cop after cop with a secret KKK hood.

And then there’s the problem of Angela herself. Despite being played by King, who has proven her talent time and again, there’s something missing in Sister Night; she has violent appetites and sharp edges that are entirely buried in Angela, who comes across to most as a family-oriented mother of three. King has extraordinary presence, but her delicate physique and arresting gaze have been used to best effect in quieter roles, like her devastating, Oscar-winning performance in If Beale Street Could Talk. Watchmen would have her be an action star, and unfortunately it never quite clicked for me.

That may be because Angela remains mysterious, even through the sixth episode. Looking Glass and Laurie Blake both get standalone episodes early in the season, and the show serves their individual character arcs much more than it serves Angela’s, despite her apparently central role. One of the first things we witness Sister Night do is beat information out of a recalcitrant witness—an abuse the other superheroes are unwilling to commit. But Angela, out of costume, is not unscrupulous or bloodthirsty; she’s generically warm and caring. The viewer is never quite made to feel her righteous anger or her formidable physical power—repressed frustrations that might turn into a predilection for dressing up and fighting crime. This might all be addressed later in the season, but it’s an especially bizarre hiccup in a world where why superheroes are superheroes is a central, repeated question.

Still, Watchmen inspires confidence. The show is so ambitious, with its multiple timelines, storytelling structures, and perspectives, that it’s perpetually surprising. The music, from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, adds an eerie undertone to the proceedings. Laurie, as played by Smart, is the best incarnation of that character—surely by now we can all admit that Moore whiffed it with her?—and midseason, the writers take on the Watchmen mythology directly, using a fake TV show called American Hero Story as a jumping off point for a rewritten history that eventually, and wonderfully, introduces backstory to an old character. (The writers are so visionary that one wishes the show looked more visionary, but aside from an occasional black-and-white filter and some intriguing camera angles, Watchmen looks like the too-dark prestige drama it is.)

At the very least, this Watchmen aims to cause conversation. It’s impossible to deny how significant it is to re-center Watchmen on racism in this way, and that alone makes the series a worthwhile investment. But the different parts of the show don’t all quite fit together yet. More than once, the show reminded me of Amazon’s Man in the High Castle, which was itself based on an influential genre work—Philip K. Dick’s science-fiction novel of the same name. Man in the High Castle also re-imagines American history, teasing the viewer with how familiar Hitler’s America is to our own. It was, for a time, a very effective spell, but like a lot of prestige dramas, Man in the High Castle eventually fell more in love with the bells and whistles of its production than the story behind it. Watchmen is still telling its story, but at least right now, its bells and whistles are doing a lot of the work.