With a projected two years to kill until Game of Thrones’ final season, co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are already planning their next show. Confederate, which is scheduled to begin production after Game of Thrones wraps, will be set in an alternate universe in which the South successfully seceded from the North, and, according to HBO’s press release, “chronicles the events leading to the Third American Civil War.”
This leaves us with questions, such as, “What happened to the Second American Civil War?” But we digress.
HBO’s release goes on to explain that Confederate
takes place in an alternate timeline, where the southern states have successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution. The story follows a broad swath 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.
Joining Benioff and Weiss, who are both white, as executive producers and writers will be Nichelle Tramble Spellman and Malcolm Spellman, who are black. That should allay any concerns anyone might have about the wisdom of a show which runs the risk of being a white supremacist’s wet dream and whose premise is to the current political climate as a lit match is to a puddle of gasoline.
The think pieces. Dear God, the think pieces.
