Even the map of the former United States of America is disturbing to witness - much more so than those wind-up maps of opposing territories opening each episode of HBO's Game of Thrones. Or an American flag with the familiar colors - but instead of stars and stripes, there's a swastika where the stars used to be. Picture this: In Times Square, a giant neon swastika emblazons a building. Many of the goose-bump-inducing moments in this new drama are visual and are startling. Film canisters contain what look to be vintage newsreels, but show an alternate history that we recognize as our own: the Nazis losing, the Japanese surrendering, and America and England emerging triumphantly.Īre the films meant as cleverly staged wish fulfillments to motivate the resistance fighters? Or are they actual glimpses of some other universe, some other reality? At first, we have no idea - and it's one of the mysteries that propels this drama so intriguingly. One of the weapons used by the resistance is a psychological one. It has been divided up by its conquerors, with the Nazis ruling the East, the Japanese ruling the West, and a strip of desolate neutral zone around the Rocky Mountains.īoth sides of the Rockies are police states, but in different ways - and there's a resistance, an underground, working to topple the oppressive governments in charge. It's not the country we remember from the '60s. Now it's a period piece, but that somehow makes it even more evocative. Back when the novel was written, that was the present day. The Man in the High Castle is Dick's alternative history story, based on a chilling hypothetical: What if the Allies had lost World War II? The action takes place on American soil in 1962, almost a generation after the war. He was a writer and producer on The X-Files, and this is the show that, if life is fair, should make lots of people take notice. Zucker, who, with Scott, is another of the executive producers of The Good Wife on CBS.īut the real workhorse here is Frank Spotnitz, who developed The Man in the High Castle for television and wrote the first two scripts. The executive producers of The Man in the High Castle include Ridley Scott, who directed Blade Runner in 1982, and David W. Dick, the same writer whose stories inspired the movies Blade Runner and Total Recall, and it's excellent. The show is called The Man in the High Castle. But on streaming television, there's a new show - available on Amazon Prime Video in its first-season entirety on Friday - that's about to change all that. For broadcast TV, this year's fall season has been decidedly, and disappointingly, below average, especially for drama series.
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