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Positive:
30
Mixed:
7
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
The IndependentJul 14, 2020
Season 1 Review:
The Plot Against America is a gripping vision of the dangers of populism and bigotry, which avoids preachiness by focusing on domestic minutiae. This is not the extreme vision of The Man in the High Castle, with its seas of swastikas, but a more nuanced exploration of political upheaval.
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Mar 17, 2020
Season 1 Review:
An intense new six-part miniseries from David Simon and Ed Burns of “The Wire” that airs on Monday nights. I can’t remember seeing a period drama — it’s set from 1940 to 1942 — that speaks so directly and specifically to the present moment. ... “The Plot Against America” is indelible piece of work about how politics reaches into personal lives.
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Mar 12, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Superb. ... To their credit, Simon and Burns, each of whom either wrote or co-wrote every episode, never get too heavy-handed in their attempts to make connections between the story they are telling and the Trump era. ... The cast of The Plot Against America does committed, convincing work across the board.
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Feb 18, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Simon and Burns craft their story with remarkable texture, tracking the nation’s downward spiral from inside a besieged family’s living room. ... The final hour is one of the most breathtakingly tense episodes of television I’ve ever seen, carrying you on a dark journey through a country on fire.
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Apr 13, 2020
Season 1 Review:
The Plot Against America feels more like a loving, compassionate project for Simon; the concern he has for each member of the Levin family, and even those seemingly trying to destroy that family, lifts the series up, creating an indelible and firmly grounded wake-up call for its viewers.
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TV Guide MagazineMar 18, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Riveting. [16-29 Mar 2020, p.11]
Mar 16, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Incisive. ... Simon is TV’s master of realism, and here the groundedness of his storytelling combines with the distinctiveness of Roth’s characters to deepen the political profundity as well as the visceral impact of this speculative fiction. Ryder, Kazan, Turturro and Spector are all spectacularly alive in roles that require them to give fiery speeches and have emotional breakdowns without appearing rehearsed. Everyone’s point of view is comprehensible, if not necessarily sympathetic. The look of the show is haunting in its familiarity.
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Mar 16, 2020
Season 1 Review:
The Levins are a family in full, not just plot-advancement devices, and Kazan and Spector are especially strong anchors. ... [Simon’s] produced a translation that’s at once fully Rothian and fully Simonian. He hasn’t changed a lot in the story, but where he has, it’s to emphasize that the charismatic bigot in the White House is not simply an aberration who can be erased and forgotten like a bad dream. ... That merger of visions makes the difference between a dutiful adaptation of a great novel and a series that is great in itself. There is plenty of pugilistic optimism in this “Plot,” but it’s tough-minded.
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The Daily BeastMar 16, 2020
Season 1 Review:
The Plot Against America is incredible, if harrowing. ... If you didn’t know what’s to come, you might be confused why what appears to be a normal family drama is being elevated as so profound. But the set dressing is necessary. Consider it the gasoline in the Molotov cocktail that episode two throws, burning all the way through the finale, which alters Roth’s own ending in a provocative—though still in the author’s spirit—way.
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Mar 16, 2020
Season 1 Review:
The final scenes of “The Plot Against America” might not offer easy, dramatically resounding resolutions on every front. I would have liked to see the story continue — but that’s also a testimony to how powerful and compelling this thought-provoking alt-history journey has been from the start.
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Mar 9, 2020
Mar 12, 2020
Season 1 Review:
The pigheaded optimism and pessimism rampant among this tragic, stubborn political hodgepodge is composed of some unbelievable characters and others all too real. Together, arcs can sometimes seem conspicuously constructed; other times they’re so out-of-control that it’s hard to believe it holds together. ... Uncomfortable as it is, it’s all immaculately crafted. The Plot Against America is another crash course in history, sociology, and political science from The Wire team that has all the power of a waking nightmare.
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The GuardianJul 14, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Over The Plot Against America’s six-hour course, Simon and Burns do their usual exceptional work in delicately fitting pieces of a larger and larger puzzle together to reveal a bigger and more complicated picture at every step. If the beginning seems a bit stagey [...] it finds its feet quickly thereafter.
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Mar 17, 2020
Mar 9, 2020
Season 1 Review:
A six-hour nightmare with an insidious creep. Some viewers are likely to complain that nothing sufficiently dramatic or awful is happening — and they'll surely be wrong — before the series twists the narrative knife by the end. ... These six hours should freak you out; if they don't, that demands introspection too.
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Mar 17, 2020
Season 1 Review:
The Plot Against America is entertaining: handsome, well-acted, and full of tensely plotted sequences—most notably, a road trip that Herman and Sandy make to Kentucky to rescue a little boy whose mother has been murdered by an ascendant KKK. But it has a slippery relationship to reality. ... The Plot Against America reminds its viewer so incessantly of its parallels to 21st-century politics that it often feels more like a parable than a drama.
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Mar 17, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Aside from giving these secondary characters more substantive scenery to chew on, our wish list also includes better dialogue for the leads, especially Spector, who spends far too much time reciting thematic exposition. When he does get to speak like a living breathing marginalized minority he’s downright gripping, but show runners Simon and Ed Burns should have more faith that viewers can read between the lines, and ditch the exposition. ... But if this miniseries falls short of those lofty goals, it’ll still be sturdily watchable, thanks to its pristine production value and impassioned acting.
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ColliderMar 16, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Spector is the show’s absolute standout, but the supporting cast is no less incredible. ... At only six episodes, the limited series is like a bullet train of storytelling, and never feels like it’s spinning its wheels. ... But the series finale also presents the biggest stumbling block. The show’s ultimate resolution to America’s spreading unrest and violence (and, let’s face it, Naziism) is ludicrous to the point of being unforgivable.
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Mar 12, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Herman is a thankless role. Bess, on the other hand, who is equal parts maternal caution and nervous calculation, is given a deeply moving portrayal by the wonderful Ms. Kazan, and is really the heart of the story. ... “The Plot Against America,” which grows increasingly nervous-making as it closes in on an ending far more topical and obvious than the one Roth provided, is overly deliberate in its period detail and almost distracting in its evocation of time and place (mostly Newark, N.J.). This is because the world it presents doesn’t look lived in and characters living in it often sound less like people out of the ’40s than people out of ’40s movies.
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Mar 13, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Early episodes, written by Simon and Burns, struggle to find the sliver of space that exists between topical significance and emotional consequence. Characters tend to expound rather than converse, having arguments with one another that sound more like op-eds than the range of personal experience. ... By the fourth episode, “The Plot Against America” begins to feel less like a book report and more like a compelling drama.
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Mar 5, 2020
Season 1 Review:
This is a show that, even as it depicts a precarious moment and exists in one, cannot bear uncertainty. That’s a tendency that makes it both a fairly unpleasant watch, and a sacrificed opportunity to depict something smaller, more tender, and more ultimately human than the end of the world.
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