Let’s Not Ban A Show Before It’s Made

Neil Calloway thinks we should wait to see if Confederate is any good…

Credit: Suzi Pratt via Wikimedia Commons

While some of us are intrigued and excited by the news this week that HBO are planning an alternate history series Confederate, which portrays a United States where slavery is still legal, there are others who have taken a different view. A campaign has begun to see production halted before it has even begun.

The show, from Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss, isn’t likely to starting production until 2018 at the least, but that hasn’t stopped some people calling for it to be scrapped. I can see their point, the wounds of the Civil War haven’t really healed, and a show which sees a large proportion of the population under the yoke of slavery is always going to be controversial. On the other hand, given precisely those facts, the show is exactly the type of series HBO should be making. In a country where statues still stand commemorating Confederate soldiers, a cold hard look at the reality of their aims is needed more than ever. Great fiction can be used to shed light on current issues: The Handmaid’s Tale has been likened to life under ISIS by more than one commentator, alongside the more obvious, though perhaps less likely, parallels of something similar happening in the US. It’s also entertaining because it’s not true; we can relax knowing it never happened.

With the likes of The Man In The High Castle and SS-GB both being successes on the small screen, another counterfactual series was inevitable. The Confederate States of America mockumentary took a similar view and didn’t generate the same opprobrium, though it came out in 2004, before social media mobs and their 21^st Century pitchforks and torches came along. The marvellously named Harry Turtledove has made a career out of writing these sort of books. “What if time travelling neo Nazis from South Africa helped the south win the Civil War with AK-47s?” is the premise of one of his bestsellers.

I’m a white, British male; slavery in the US seems as remote to me as burning witches at the stake in the middle ages, but a show like this could bring home the issues that many rightly feel so unhappy about to those of us who perhaps don’t understand. The superb Fruitvale Station illuminated the issue of police shootings better than a thousand news reports ever could.

My main issue is that the show hasn’t been made yet; calling for a show to be stopped before it has seen the light of day is a dangerous path to go down; end up looking like a stuffy, censorious politician who calls for something to be banned before having to admit they’ve never seen it.

If we can use fiction and history to help us understand our world, then why not a mixture of both?

Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future instalments.

Originally published August 6, 2017. Updated April 17, 2018.