Having created the classic series The Wire, and with his current show The Deuce having received critical acclaim and just been renewed for its third and final season, HBO obviously have an affinity for David Simon. So it’s no surprise to hear that the network has already got him setting up another project.
Per THR, HBO has made a production commitment to Simon’s adaptation of the Philip Roth novel The Plot Against America, which be a six episode mini-series, and is expected to be Simon’s next project after he wraps on The Deuce.
Roth’s novel was published in 2004 and imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt was defeated in the 1940 presidential election by Charles Lindbergh, an xenophobic populist, whose tenure brings about a wave of anti-semitism. The story plays out through the 40s as World War II reaches a turning point, and is told through the eyes of a working-class Jewish family living in New Jersey.
Simon will co-write the script with longtime collaborator Ed Burns, and the two will also executive produce the show which is obviously deeply relevant in 2018. Roth’s novel isn’t totally fictitious, as Lindbergh was a strict isolationist and Nazi sympathiser who believed in eugenics and expressed strong views about preserving “European blood”.
Simon adapting such a relevant novel sounds fascinating. Although he has traditionally made longform series, he did wade into mini-series territory in 2015 with the Oscar Isaac-led Show Me A Hero. He also had also been developing a series based on the Spanish civil war, but that appears to have been placed on the back-burner in favour of arguably a far more important project.
#Peace.Love.ThePlotAgainstAmerica
