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What if the Nazis won? The inexorable rise of alternative histories on TV

Stopping the world and getting off is what TV drama lets us do. Any fiction creates some kind of alternative reality, even if it’s just our own world with imaginary characters. But right now, the alternative history drama, where we exchange our present for a life in which humanity took a different path, is big. HBO’s The Plot Against America, based on Philip Roth’s novel, is just the latest show to comment on our current political reality by placing us at a hypothetical crossroads.

Proper alternative histories take a pivotal event and change its outcome, the classic example being the result of the second world war. The allied victory is undone in Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, and partly reversed in another of its series, Hunters, where the Nazis have lost but retain a network of operatives in the US. Shows such as The Handmaid’s Tale, which introduces a novel event (part of the US is taken over by an extreme religious dictatorship) rather than reshaping an existing one, aren’t alternative histories, but they perform the same function of providing a what-if warning.

Alternative histories of whatever hue lean, inevitably at present, towards the theme of fascism. However, such shows can be rife with traps. Take Hunters, a queasy thriller that occasionally affords its story of 70s US neo-Nazis and their equally clandestine pursuers a questionable action-comedy vibe.

Not only that, but it regularly features Nazis being so confident, capable and imaginative in their violent hatred that it’s hard not to be perversely impressed. It recalls murder dramas such as Hannibal, where we are encouraged to give killers marks for sadistic flair. Even with fictional culprits, that lingering gaze at brutality can be ethically questionable; the way Hunters dreams up elaborate ways in which the Nazis might have killed Jewish people in concentration camps has rightly been criticised for a cavalier melding of the real and the imaginary. When you can imagine actual Nazis enjoying a show, perhaps it’s not “alternative” enough.

Besides, it’s easy for alternative-world dramas to wheel out Nazis as cheap signifiers. Season three of Westworld this year widened the show’s universe to include a robot-staffed theme park where the impulses indulged by visitors were those of Italy’s wartime occupiers. Having dangled swastikas in front of the audience, however, the show didn’t say anything profound enough about Nazism to justify the specific referencing. In 2017, the BBC drama SS-GB started strongly with spooky shots of London under Hitler’s rule in a mirror 1940s, but then used the imagined occupation as a backdrop for a sludgy thriller in which fascism was sometimes not much more than a low-key bummer.

However, some shows do follow through properly on the Nazi victory premise. The Man in the High Castle, based on Philip K Dick’s novel in which the US of the 60s is split between German and Japanese rule, is alternative history squared, featuring parallel universes. Rather than just being a device to gratuitously intensify the what-if intrigue, it becomes a clever way to give characters, and viewers, vivid lessons, learned with a glimpse at how different their lives could be. The increasingly central protagonist John Smith (Rufus Sewell), an American who becomes a high-ranking Nazi officer, tries to tell himself and others that his own moral responsibility is limited by the sweep of events. He tries not to acknowledge the victims of his actions. But seeing his alternative self making braver choices removes that comfort from him and forces him to face what he’s done.

The Plot Against America offers a vision of an alternative world that’s subtler than the average fictionalised Nazi story, and all the more strong and agile for it. It’s 1940, and the celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh has followed through on his, at best, ambivalent view of the Nazis (this is all factual, so far) by running for US president (which the actual Lindbergh didn’t), and winning. As antisemitism rises, a Jewish family in New Jersey struggles to deal with a menace that is, with obvious relevance to our current reality, obscured by dogwhistles and denial.

Related: 'It can't happen here': the horrifying power of The Plot Against America

Instead of cartoonish “imagine if that happened” whimsy, the show aims for a fine-grained realism – as you’d expect from its showrunners, the creators of the Wire, David Simon and Ed Burns – majoring on how hard it is for people fighting on the same side of an existential battle to hold the same line, and how everyday life is infected and distorted by the pressure of worrying about what further horrors are on the horizon.

This is alternative history at its most powerful, with echoes of Trump’s America pitched at a volume that’s not deafening, but which can’t be ignored. As The Plot Against America zeroes in on individuals’ response to potentially cataclysmic political shifts, it’s less what if, and more … what now?

  • The Plot Against America begins tonight, 9pm, Sky Atlantic/NOW TV