This is a curio, simple as that. And yet it's hard to ignore the work that went into it. This is a one-of-a-kind occurrence. Normally a book is translated into an audio format, like a radio play (at best) and with a narrator or sometimes actors playing various roles (i.e. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas the audio book has this). With Watchmen, unlike the movie by Zack Snyder, this is absolutely faithful to the source, with every panel included (the only thing it lacks, somewhat sadly, are those novel-type in-between chapters in Watchmen, such as the excerpts from Under the Hood), and with Dave Gibbons and the original colorist included.
It's a pleasure to watch the images come to life, and with a level of vibrancy that does make one see the recreation of an entire masterwork. As with the book, you can get sucked in and want to read/watch the entire thing. The only big difference, however, and the most glaring deterrent, is that when reading the Watchmen book you can fill in the gaps and the characters with your own voices and accents and things, as with any book, and pause at will. With this, it's continuous and with one voice only. This isn't to decry Tom Stechschulte too much, since he bounces between the male characters reasonably well (he even puts on a clever Nixon accent). But when it comes to the women, or with certain minorities (i.e. the pregnant Vietnamese woman), it doesn't work nearly as well. It's a matter of taste, perhaps, but they should have tried for a few more actors or voice-people to cover the book-on-video.
But if you're a big fan of the book, and you have an interest in seeing something like this that hasn't been done before, do check it out, if only for a few episodes. It's an approach that could pave the way for more... which depending on point of view is a great thing or a terrible thing. At the least it's an admirable experiment.
