Recovering from the end of such an important and successful mass phenomenon like Game of Thrones has not been easy for HBO. However, just like 17 years ago when The Sopranos ended, their programming executives have managed to find new mass hits in proposals like The Last of Us, The Penguin, or the Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon. Along the way, there have been several failed projects. Today I come to talk to you about one of them, one that was doomed from the first news it starred in.
Gettysburg (1993).
It is fair to call Confederate a kind of heir to Game of Thrones for one simple reason: David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, writers of HBO’s fantasy drama, were going to once again act as authors-producers of the program here. But why was the series destined to be shelved from day 1?
A world where slavery is legal in the U.S
Confederate, as described by its writers in an interview dated 2017, was going to narrate the prelude to a Third Civil War in the U.S. How a third one? Has there been a second one? Basically, the fiction took us to an alternative timeline where the Civil War ended satisfactorily for the Southern states, giving way to a new nation where slavery remained legal until the 21st century and had become institutionalized.
“The story follows a wide range of characters on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone: freedom fighters, slave hunters, politicians, abolitionists, journalists, executives of a slaveholding conglomerate, and families of enslaved people,” added Benioff and Weiss in EW.
Uchronias are part of our lives, and in fact, one of Prime Video’s early successes was in the genre. The Man in the High Castle adapted a novel by Philip K. Dick into a TV series format, imagining a United States that had been divided by Germany and Japan after the end of World War II.
The Man in the High Castle, a great example of uchrony on television.
That program, with a 7.9/10 on IMDb after four seasons, showed that there was a certain appetite among the audience to explore this type of stories. While the Amazon show succeeded, HBO faced a very angry response on social media united under the hashtag: #NoConfederate, which basically called for the cancellation of the program without waiting for its filming.
Few believed in the ability of Benioff and Weiss
Among the protesters, there were many opinions. Most found the idea of exploring a world where slavery continued to be legal in the U.S., at least in part of what is now the U.S., horrifying, while others also criticized the fact that it was another series written by white people on this topic. “What confidence should we have in two gentlemen who can’t talk about race in their own series (Game of Thrones) and who have had seven seasons to introduce important black characters?” activist April Reign argued.
What was HBO’s response? “We have faith that the writers will address the subject with care and sensitivity. The project is currently in its early stages, we hope people reserve their judgment until there is something to see.” The truth is that little has been heard about the topic since then. Most likely, the calamitous end of Game of Thrones also caused HBO to lose confidence in their writers, and the series was canceled in 2020. Benioff and Weiss, on the other hand, ended up doing The Three-Body Problem on Netflix.
Image: Gods and Generals
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