There are small problems with setting and tone that can take you out of the action sometimes-the series uses CG sparingly, but when it does it usually looks like TV CG (which is to say, not great). Suburban New York homes and families would be right at home in the first season of Mad Men, except for the kids walking around in Hitler Youth uniforms. West Coast office buildings are outfitted with Japanese-style sliding doors. This extends to the set and costume design, which meld late-1950s fashion and hairstyles with the same alien imagery. The show evokes the look and feel of quintessentially American cities that have been occupied for a decade or so, familiar foundations draped over with out-of-place swastikas and rising suns. You spend the bulk of these 10 episodes in alternate-1960s New York and San Francisco, and the show absolutely nails the combination of familiar-and-alien. Dick manages to convey all of this and more to the reader not with some lengthy prologue or a mid-story info-dump, but by showing you this world from a variety of perspectives and letting his characters live their lives.Īmazon’s series does an outstanding job carrying over Dick’s setting and tone. That’s not all that’s going on, but it tells you most of what you need to know about the book without spoiling much about it. And multiple characters are reading a popular book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, an alternate-history-novel-within-an-alternate-history-novel where the Allies actually won World War II (but not quite in the way we’re familiar with). A German spy tries to collude with a Japanese spy to prevent war.
Meanwhile, in occupied San Francisco, an antiques dealer worries that his business selling prewar Americana to the Japanese could be threatened by counterfeiters. This worries Japan-the two countries’ Cold War-esque relationship is fragile enough, and the wrong person in power could lead to a war Japan knows it can’t win. By the late 1940s, the Allies had surrendered-Germany controls the East Coast, Japan holds the West Coast and the Rocky Mountains serve as a natural buffer (and neutral zone) between the two.Īdolf Hitler is alive but largely incapacitated by the syphilis that real-world scholarship suggests he may have suffered from Germany has the technological upper-hand but unstable leadership. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was assassinated in 1933, which led to a succession of weak Presidents who failed to dig America out of the Great Depression and left the country ill-prepared (or, even more ill-prepared) for the Pearl Harbor attack. The basic concept is one that has launched a thousand historical fiction stories: “What if the Axis Powers had won World War II?” It sounds like a cliché to the modern reader, but the book continues to feel fresh because of how well-considered the differences are. There’s no one plot that really constitutes the “main” storyline (Juliana Frink's search for the titular Man in the High Castle comes the closest), but the real value of the work is in how it uses those characters and their perspectives to build a believable reality. Like any good TV drama, Dick’s version of Man in the High Castle juggles multiple characters whose storylines all occasionally intersect. What the book did well, and how the show does it justice It’s merely a decent show, and in this Peak TV era “decent” isn’t enough to stand out. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as successful as a TV show on its own merits. Dick’s 1962 novel of the same name, is sort of Amazon’s take on a period drama like The Americans, but the twist in this case is that the period never actually existed.Īs an adaptation of Dick's work, the show is quite successful-book-to-screen adaptations can be hard work, but Castle’s creative team kept the book’s world intact while expanding and adding to it in ways that make sense for a visual medium. Man in the High Castle, a new series based on Philip K. I don’t think that’s a bad problem to have, necessarily, but I do know that it’s deeply strange to live in a universe where I can get Emmy award-winning television and an 80-pack of toilet paper rolls from the same company.īut that's the universe we live in! And Amazon has proven that it’s more than capable of putting out scripted dramas that can stand up to the stuff that airs on AMC and FX. They say we’re either approaching or have already passed Peak TV, the point where there is so much above-average scripted television coming at us from so many sources that no one could possibly keep up with everything that’s worth watching.
Warning: this review contains minor spoilers to several episodes of the show and Philip K.