HBO's Confederate and the creative bankruptcy of prestige TV

Casting a modern-day slave-holding South as an antihero? This is the best they could come up with?

A confederate memorial at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
(Image credit: Frank Tozier / Alamy Stock Photo)

Let's start by granting that Confederate — the recently announced and already derided HBO series about a fictional version of contemporary America that would exist if the South had won the Civil War — might actually bring insight and intelligence to a subject that has rarely been handled well.

Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss — who are teaming up again for Confederate — made a point of including two gifted black creators, Malcolm Spellman (Empire) and Nichelle Tramble Spellman (The Good Wife), both of whom seem confident that the series will handle its "weapons-grade material" (Spellman's phrase) with care. Still, critics of the (still unmade and thus unseen) show breathed a sigh of relief when Amazon announced its own series dedicated to counterfactual history: Black America wonders what would have happened if America's enslaved population had received three states as reparations. This struck many as the more promising project: a thought experiment in which black Americans form their own society and live as neighbors with their ex-oppressors seems like a rich dramatic premise, for one thing. For another, this is less saturated terrain: We aren't exactly drowning in fantasies — historical or otherwise — that grant black people equal power.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.