HBO plans "Confederate", a series where the US South successfully seceded

[lpetrich]

HBO Picks Up Game of Thrones Showrunners’ Civil War Drama: Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have a new project in the works.

HBO announced today that it has ordered Confederate, a new drama series from Benioff and Weiss that takes place in an alternate version of America where the South successfully seceded from the Union, “giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution.”

The series takes place during the the lead-up to “Third American Civil War” and will follow a collection of characters on “both sides of the Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone — freedom fighters, slave hunters, politicians, abolitionists, journalists, the executives of a slave-holding conglomerate and the families of people in their thrall.”

It has already provoked lots of controversy, and its creators respond in an interview: HBO’s ‘Confederate’ Producers Respond to the Backlash

Another concern some have raised is that a show like this could end up as almost pornography or wish-fulfillment for white supremacists and the alt-right. What’s your reaction to that worry about a show where the South won the Civil War.

MS: I think that [using the word] “winning” creates the wrong image. [In the world of Confederate], it was a standstill.

The Creators of HBO’s Alt-History Civil War Show Face Backlash Head On | Vanity Fair

The series was initially dreamt up by the Thrones showrunners, who later brought the Spellmans into the fold. Weiss remembers having the idea after reading a bit of Civil War history and learning how one of Robert E. Lee’s botched invasions could have altered the course of the war if it had gone as planned. “What would the world have looked like if Lee had sacked D.C., if the South had won—that just always fascinated me.”

Malcolm and Nichelle, who are black, said the material is “deeply personal because we are the offspring of this history. We deal with it directly and have for our entire lives. We deal with it in Hollywood, we deal with it in the real world when we’re dealing with friends and family members.”

'Game of Thrones' Creators, HBO to Air Alt-Civil War Series - Rolling Stone

Production for Confederate will begin following the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones, which is expected to debut in 2018 or early 2019. The seventh and penultimate season premiered last Sunday. The episode featured Ed Sheeran singing the unofficially titled "Hands of Gold."

Confederate, a Civil War dystopia from the Game of Thrones creators, is already controversial - Vox

“It goes without saying slavery is the worst thing that ever happened in American history,” said Weiss. “It’s our original sin as a nation. And history doesn’t disappear.”

...
“Pretty much the only black people in Game of Thrones are slaves,” Ira Madison writes at the Daily Beast, adding that Game of Thrones’ track record on depictions of sexual assault is similarly uninspiring. “Do we need another show from them where the black people are slaves and the threat of rape from slaveowners is ever-present?”

When Adalian asked Benioff and Weiss about the backlash to how they’ve treated race on Game of Thrones, Weiss instead emphasized that they are “very hyper aware of the difference between a show with a fictional history and a fictional world, and a show that’s an alternate history of this world.”

It's still very early, so it's hard to say how the series will turn out.

Will it feature the North trying to appease the South by being unwelcoming to runaway slaves? Complete with the South acting as if nothing the North can do is ever enough, short of the North sending its entire black population southward.

Or both the North and the South being more friendly to western Native Americans than in our timeline, because they need all the friends they can get for confronting each other.

 

[lpetrich]

No, I Will Not Be Watching HBO’s Confederacy and Neither Should You – Waking Writer by Berneta L. Haynes.

1) I will not watch any fantasy show about an alternative reality where the Confederacy won the war and slavery was never abolished. Period. It is a thinly veiled white supremacist fantasy cloaked in liberal whyte guilt. I’ll pass.

Whyte? With a y? Why not "honky" or "cracker"?

After more comments in that vein, she proposes

7) Why isn’t Hollywood interested in other alternative realities, like one where the Native Americans won, where there was a successful slave uprising in the American South, where Jim Crow never happened, where the Mexican-American war turned out differently, where Wounded Knee never happened, where Shirley Chisholm became president? Oh right. I know why.

What interesting scenarios. Maybe BLH could try writing some.

Native Americans won? They were lots of small communities, and some of them were hostile to each other. They also could not catch up fast enough technologically and socially to succeed in fighting us off.

But there are some possibilities. Imagine Hernán Cortés and his men failing to conquer the Aztec Empire. The Aztecs would likely have celebrated with a victory barbecue featuring HC himself as the main course. In that timeline, the Spaniards stay in the Caribbean islands and the Aztecs trade with them, getting iron and domestic animals and the like. They become much more difficult to fight, and the Spaniards become content with diplomatic relations. During this time, the Aztecs recover from smallpox and other Spaniard-introduced diseases, and they become carriers, infecting their neighbors.

Further northward, in the Mississippi River valley, the Cahokians had an impressive society around 1100 - 1300 CE. If they had recovered after 1400, they would likely have suffered from European-introduced diseases around 1500 - 1600, but since they were not in much danger of being conquered, they could have recovered from that also. By 1800, they would have had the unpleasant experience of lots of refugees fleeing from the east coast. So they decide that they don't want to suffer that fate, and they reach out to Spain for an alliance. They end up getting domestic animals and lots of technology, and as the United States expands westward, the Americans run into the Cahokians.

Eventually, the Cahokian leadership and aristocracy gets too full of itself and the Cahokian empire falls apart. By by then, about 1900 (say), neither the Americans nor the Canadians have much desire to acquire land from the Cahokians or their successor states.

 

[repoman]

nm

 

[lpetrich]

As to a successful slave uprising in the American South, that would be very difficult. I think that the only thing that could make that work would be some foreign power wanting to weaken the early US. Like Spain.

Jim Crow not happening? In our timeline, Reconstruction was followed by a counterrevolutionary backlash called Redemption, which made Southern black people second-class citizens again. To keep Reconstruction going would have required a lot of political will from the North, and that is rather doubtful.

Not sure about the Mexican War or Wounded Knee -- the US was too powerful, and it would have to have suffered some big distraction to be defeated there. Like suffering its Civil War earlier or later than in our timeline.

As to Shirley Chisholm becoming President, among alternate-history buffs, that is known as a "wank". That's when something or other gets turned into a big victor.

-

As to how to tell stories that span long time periods, I think that Alex Haley's "Roots" offers a way to do that. Follow the adventures of some family over the centuries. But Isaac Asimov didn't even try to do that in his Foundation series.

 

[Jayjay]

My first thought was, how do you keep up the institution of slavery in modern times? Every other country gave up slavery, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because slavery just wasn't economically viable in an industrial age. You'd have to make some pretty unbelievable assumptions how history turned out to keep it up until the modern days. I think the mockumentary "Conferedate States of America" did this pretty well, but even that kind of turned into a comedy as it entered modern days.

The idea of South winning the war is an interesting idea, but not sure if the focus should be on slavery after 100 years. In any case I wish good luck to this project. I hope it will spur more alternative history shows on tv.

 

[Bronzeage]

If the Confederacy had managed to battle the North to a draw and make some kind of armistice, it's unlikely the Confederacy could have come out of it with any great advantages. It doubtful that captured territory would have been returned, including New Orleans and it's port. Whether the Confederacy could have remained united is another question. As every Confederate state had a seacoast, any of them could declare themselves a sovereign state and gone it's own way.

The subtle factor which few people recognize is that the fight was not over slave labor, it was over slave trade. Eastern states depended upon selling slaves to the west, in order to maintain a balance of trade. Their plantations were depleted and production was low. They had to sell surplus slaves to make up the difference. If every slave were freed at midnight, they would still be agricultural labor. The slave traders would be out of business. This economic tension between east and west would create schisms in the solid south.

Another factor to consider is, freed of the burden of compromising with the South, Northern abolitionist forces no longer have to contend with sympathetic run away slave laws. It would be practically impossible to keep slaves in place without incredibly harsh restrictions, probably equal to a modern penitentiary. This would reduce productivity and greatly increase the cost of slave labor. Given this reality slavery would have to be abandoned for economic reasons.

 

[Patooka]

I was really hoping that this might has been a series based on Harry Turtledoves' Southern Victory series, which I could see HBO pull off. I mean, if The Man in the High Castle was turned into a show, why not?

 

[Opoponax]

It'll be worth watching based on its merits, not on:

1) Overly sensitive leftists who, despite not being much of any threat to anyone in terms of free speech, somehow manage to scare the shit out of Trumptards. And that leads to:

2) Trumptards. They already hate this show despite never having seen it. They're up in stupid arms about it being anti-white man (seriously). Thus, it is necessary to see it and give it good ratings, just to piss them off.

 

[J842P]

It'll be worth watching based on its merits, not on:

1) Overly sensitive leftists who, despite not being much of any threat to anyone in terms of free speech, somehow manage to scare the shit out of Trumptards. And that leads to:

2) Trumptards. They already hate this show despite never having seen it. They're up in stupid arms about it being anti-white man (seriously). Thus, it is necessary to see it and give it good ratings, just to piss them off.

Yeah, you can guarantee it will be worth checking out if it manages to piss off both sides.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Yeah, the whole concept is wonky. My problem with it is a few things. Firstly, wasn't the South having issues with their land as farmland in the first place? They needed to extend slavery out to the territories. Secondly, expansion into the west would have been a bit tough. With California being part of the North, the Mexican Cessation also being part of US territory, it'd been hard. Thirdly, Chicago was a major player, and in splitting the Mississippi in half, they may lost a massive portion of trade. Chicago and the North could very likely work extremely hard at developing trade options shifting to the east via the Great Lakes, railroads, and canals. The US would have settled faster into the Plain states and launch a massive agrarian program to make up for losses in the South.

I'd like the idea of the South tying the Civil War, but really, the South was likely never in a good position to be its own nation.

- - - Updated - - -

I was really hoping that this might has been a series based on Harry Turtledoves' Southern Victory series, which I could see HBO pull off. I mean, if The Man in the High Castle was turned into a show, why not?

Because Americans have no aversion for the Japanese or Germans being the bad guys.

 

[Mumbles]

I was really hoping that this might has been a series based on Harry Turtledoves' Southern Victory series, which I could see HBO pull off. I mean, if The Man in the High Castle was turned into a show, why not?

Well, there are plenty of reasons why it can't possibly be like The Man in the High Castle - most importantly the fact that German doesn't have Nazi flags and statues of WW2 Nazi leaders all over the place (and actually, don't German bigots use the Confederate battle flag because the Nazi flag is outlawed?)

But yes, it does resemble author/historian Harry Turtledove's series - except that, when interviewed, neither of the two "creators" could name the Battle at Anteheim, which is the battle that both storylines give to the Confederacy instead of the Union in order to explain how the Confederacy won. So, in other words, this is currently set to be an ignorant-ass ripoff of Turtledove's series.

 

[LordKiran]

I'm not overly interested in 'alternative history' as a subject matter. To me it's the ugly step-sibling of speculative fiction. I just can't buy the core premises! To me, the confederacy winning is as laughable as the The Schlieffen plan actually working as intended.

Now if there was a show based on history's "What if?"s and confined them to their immediate historical contexts....

 

[bilby]

I'm not overly interested in 'alternative history' as a subject matter. To me it's the ugly step-sibling of speculative fiction. I just can't buy the core premises! To me, the confederacy winning is as laughable as the The Schlieffen plan actually working as intended.

Now if there was a show based on history's "What if?"s and confined them to their immediate historical contexts....

Well it all comes down to the individual consumer and how much they are prepared to suspend disbelief. All fiction is to some extent implausible; I find that Turtledove in particular manages to conjure alternative history worlds which are not so jarringly implausible to me as to render them unentertaining, but that's likely in part a reflection of my ignorance of some of the salient details.

I recently was quite annoyed by a SciFi story I was reading*, in which our heroes end up building a base in the Cretaceous, to avoid leaving archaeological traces that might be found by their 21st century adversaries. The idea that they could have a maguffin that allowed them to move freely in time and space I found easy to accept; But the story was ruined for me when their bunker was described as being a partially buried concrete structure, difficult to see from a distance, because of the thick grass that had grown over it.

Grass? In the Cretaceous? Grasses didn't evolve until the last dinosaur had been dead for 30 million years! The way the scene was described made it clear that the author thought the grass was native, not something brought back by the time travelers. It really annoyed me, by taking me out of the story.

In the second book of the trilogy, he changes the description to say that the overgrowth is 'at first sight like grass, but different, with much thicker stems and tiny leaves', which I presume was a response to reader complaints about this faux pas. It was a trivial detail that was in no way required for the storyline or plot. But it was enough to significantly reduce my enjoyment of the tale (but not enough to stop me from buying book two when I finished book one)


*https://www.amazon.com.au/Extracted-Trilogy-Book-1-ebook/dp/B01HIKCA52

 

[lpetrich]

But yes, it does resemble author/historian Harry Turtledove's series - except that, when interviewed, neither of the two "creators" could name the Battle at Anteheim, which is the battle that both storylines give to the Confederacy instead of the Union in order to explain how the Confederacy won. So, in other words, this is currently set to be an ignorant-ass ripoff of Turtledove's series.

That's the  Battle of Antietam.

The Battle of Antietam /ænˈtiːtəm/, also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, particularly in the South, was fought on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland and Antietam Creek as part of the Maryland Campaign. It was the first field army-level engagement in the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War to take place on Union soil and is the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, with a combined tally of 22,717 dead, wounded, or missing.[8]

 

[lpetrich]

Wikipedia has a big article on  American Civil War alternate histories.

The American Civil War is a popular point of divergence in English-language alternate history fiction. The most common variant of these detail the victory and survival of the Confederate States of America. Less common variants include a Union victory under different circumstances than in actual history, resulting in a different post-war situation; African-American slaves freeing themselves by revolt without waiting for Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation; a direct British intervention in the war; the survival of Lincoln and his wife during John Wilkes Booth's assassination attempt; a retelling of historical events with fantasy elements inserted; and secret history tales.

 Southern Victory about Harry Turtledove's series, has lots of plot summaries.

 Hypothetical Axis victory in World War II -- that's what "The Man in the High Castle" is.

 

[repoman]

Why are people giving the producers shit for being white? They are also Jewish but no one is talking about that.

 

[bilby]

Wikipedia has a big article on  American Civil War alternate histories.

The American Civil War is a popular point of divergence in English-language alternate history fiction. The most common variant of these detail the victory and survival of the Confederate States of America. Less common variants include a Union victory under different circumstances than in actual history, resulting in a different post-war situation; African-American slaves freeing themselves by revolt without waiting for Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation; a direct British intervention in the war; the survival of Lincoln and his wife during John Wilkes Booth's assassination attempt; a retelling of historical events with fantasy elements inserted; and secret history tales.

 Southern Victory about Harry Turtledove's series, has lots of plot summaries.

 Hypothetical Axis victory in World War II -- that's what "The Man in the High Castle" is.

I rather liked Turtledove's The Guns of the South, in which the Confederates are given a technological advantage in weaponry through highly unlikely means

(spoilers)

Show

members of the AWB from a future (alternative future history) South Africa, in which they are besieged by both the ANC and the rest of the world, all of whom support an end to Apartheid, use a time machine to go back to the American Civil War and supply AK-47s (and ammunition and training) to the Confederate Army, hoping to change history and create a 21st century world with a powerful pro-Apartheid America, that would then help to maintain white supremacy in South Africa.

The very clearly fictional premise IMO allows the reader to tolerate a much higher degree of divergence from reality, while still suspending disbelief to the extent needed to enjoy the tale that is being told.

 

[Mumbles]

That's the  Battle of Antietam.

The Battle of Antietam /ænˈtiːtəm/, also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, particularly in the South, was fought on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland and Antietam Creek as part of the Maryland Campaign. It was the first field army-level engagement in the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War to take place on Union soil and is the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, with a combined tally of 22,717 dead, wounded, or missing.[8]

Yeah, thanks - I always rely on my computer to check my spelling, since I'm a horrible typist

Point remains - this has been done before, by far more knowledgable people than this pair. And another objection is that, while HBO greenlights this series, a successful series like Underground is still being shopped around after it's two season run, basically because Sinclair bought the network it was running on and booted it off. And there are plenty of other possible stories as well - a fiction about freed slaves attempting to reunite with their families, or an alternate history where Reconstruction wasn't abandoned far too soon.

 

[lpetrich]

... an alternate history where Reconstruction wasn't abandoned far too soon.

Seems interesting, and that's pretty much required for Berneta Haynes's no-Jim-Crow scenario. But how might that plausibly happen?

I'd earlier called Shirley Chisholm becoming President an alternate-history wank:
Alternate History Wank - TV Tropes

In the parlance of Alternate History fandom, a "Wank" is where a single nation, culture, political theory, or philosophy is singled out and advantaged, typically disproportionately at the expense of its contemporaries.

Like the Roman Empire lasting to the present day and conquering the world.

I called it a wank because it seemed too much like wishful thinking, with SC being BH's Mary Sue. But I thought about it some more, and I've decided that there is indeed a path to the White House for her.

In 1972 or 1976 or thereabouts, a white male Southern Democrat wins in the primaries. I will call him Billy Wagoner. Despite his triumph, rumors circulate about his health, rumors that he is not as healthy as he seems. But he goes on to the convention, and he selects Shirley Chisholm as his Vice President. In part to balance the ticket with a black female Northern Democrat.

BW and SC campaign, they win the election, and they get inaugurated. But a few months afterward, BW suffers a heart attack and dies. SC becomes President. To reassure everybody about her health, she gets a thorough medical checkup, and the doctors reveal that she is in good health.

I don't know how it might continue from there.

 

[Sarpedon]

The Longer-better reconstruction alt scenerio could have happened if, instead of the 'National Union Party' which contained both Republicans and War Democrats, Lincoln had just stuck with the Republican Party. Sure, he was trying to shore up his chances at the polls, but really it was Sherman's capture of Atlanta that gave it to him, and probably would have given it to him if he hadn't done that. He played it safe, but one could easily imagine him gambling.

A republican convention would have given Lincoln a republican vice president, instead of the drunken democrat, Johnson. Without Johnson, there would have been better continuity in government, and there would have been no impeachment crisis. Once the republicans failed to impeach Johnson, reconstruction was over.