The Plot Against America: Sky Atlantic series shows a parallel history that has echoes of today's world
The world is in chaos and fascism is on the march. But enough about 2020 – what about America in 1940? That’s the time period to which we travel for Wire creator David Simon’s new series. Adapted from Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, (Sky Atlantic) imagines a parallel history in which dashing airman and real-life Hitler fanboy Charles Lindbergh is elected American President.
Lindbergh was a protectionist and a xenophobe whose politics could be summed up as “Make America Great Again” (he was a vocal supporter of the isolationist American First Committee). So the present-day resonances of the Plot Against America require little elaboration.
Yet if succeeding as allegory how does the drama, co-created by Simon and his Wire collaborator Ed Burns, fare as entertainment?
Better than you might expect. is generally agreed to be one of the greatest TV shows of all time.
Goodness it could be worthy and slow-moving, though. Television’s answer to eating all your veg, with dessert postponed indefinitely has just six hours to tell its story.
But in episode one – and as with – nobody involved is in a hurry.
The cautious pacing pays of, however. That’s thanks, in part, to mesmerising performances by Winona Ryder, Zoe Kazan, John Turturro and Morgan Spector as members of the Newark, New Jersey Jewish community caught in the pincer grip of Lindbergh’s anti-Semitism.
Lindbergh and the coming of the fascists is part of the background noise of their lives. And yet there are so many distractions, which is probably how it must have felt to be a Jew in Germany in 1932.
For Ryder’s Evelyn Finkel, for instance, the most pressing issue isn’t extremist politics but a tragic love-life and her affair with a rabbi who refuses to leave his family for her.
Then there is her younger sister Bess (Kazan), married to Herman (Spector), a successful insurance agent and vocal critic of Lindbergh. The other big name is John Turturro, playing a spiritual leader inclined to facilitate rather than resist Lindbergh and his hate-mongering.
Anti-semitism comes dripping slow in the first hour. That, however, merely accentuates the horrifying sense of inevitability.
Evil doesn’t always stomp in wearing jackboots and carrying torches. Sometimes the poison seeps though imperceptibly. By the time you notice it’s too late.
The lesson of is that what happened under Hitler could occur anywhere in the correct circumstances.
It’s a message that needs repeating now more than ever.
However, the real triumph of the series is that it functions both as warning from alternative history and also as a gripping watch.
