![]() ![]() Part of the problem lies with history itself. So why is this uneven miniseries far less compelling than it sounds on paper? ![]() And the performances are stunning, especially Zoe Kazan’s as the fearful but realistic Bess and Winona Ryder’s as her self-deluding sister, Evelyn. The show’s high-profile creators are David Simon and Ed Burns, the team behind the classic series The Wire. ![]() An ordinary, working-class Jewish family in New Jersey – Herman and Bess Levin, their two young sons and their relatives – grapple with the fallout of an anti-Semite in the White House. ![]() Philip Roth’s 2004 novel posits that aviator Charles Lindbergh, a national hero, Nazi sympathiser and isolationist – all of those things historically true – became US president in the early 1940s, with Hitler on the rise. Like The Handmaid’s Tale, based on Margaret Atwood’s novel, the HBO series The Plot Against America has an impeccable literary source. All reassure us ‘At least that didn’t happen’. Perhaps because our own times seem bleak, alternate histories are flourishing on screen, ranging from the dystopian, piercingly real Handmaid’s Tale to the apocalyptic, mind-bending Watchmen and most recently Hunters, with cartoonish characters pursuing resurgent Nazis. ![]()
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