The Plot Against America

HBO | Release Date: March 16, 2020

7.9	USER SCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 37 Ratings

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RewriteMay 22, 2020

I found The Plot Against America disappointing.
There are far too many one-dimensional characters whose motivations remain a mystery. The result of this is a lot of loud arguing. I feel like I’m watching a televised version of the worst partI found The Plot Against America disappointing.
There are far too many one-dimensional characters whose motivations remain a mystery. The result of this is a lot of loud arguing. I feel like I’m watching a televised version of the worst part of Facebook – the pointless political posts and the insipid argument that follow in the comments.
The lack of character development is surprising coming from David Simon and Ed Reed. Their signature series, The Wire, was made so interesting exactly because it delved so deeply into the many sides in the drug war. The major characters were fully developed. You cared about most of them; even Stringer Bell had a few redeeming qualities (and a cool name). Both Homicide and The Deuce displayed similar depth.
I haven’t read the Phillip Roth novel the show is adapted from and have no plans to. I’ve done enough research to know the show’s plot is mostly faithful to the book, but I don’t know if the characters are as wooden as they are in the show. If they are, this is an artistic failure by Simon and Burns. While the book is told solely through the eyes of young Phillip, the show is told through a mix of characters which is a good change. Unfortunately, most of these characters are difficult to sympathize with. The only people I liked were Phillip and his mother Bess, both of whom were not coincidentally the best developed characters.
Unfortunately, Herman (Phillip’s father), is the person we see the most and who most needed to be fleshed out. Instead it seemed like most of his scenes were yelling at various people or complaining about the state of the nation. What was most difficult to understand was when he seemed to purposely choose battles that were unnecessary. I understand standing up for oneself and one’s family, but he makes poor choices in choosing his battles.
As a father your family comes first, yet Herman was constantly putting them in jeopardy for his own honor. He only stops acting this way when Bess delivers him an ultimatum. Perhaps there was something in his past that would make this flaw understandable, but we’ll never know because the writers never bothered to show that. This would have been a much better show if there were far less yelling and more nuanced debates. Herman’s character could have been fully developed that way. It would have been even better if the motivations of the ‘bad guys’ had been explored. What were the fears and anger that drove them towards fascist tendencies? Charles Lindbergh would have been a perfect start. Herman seemed divided between his Jewishness and his American identity. The whole assimilation issue was touched upon when Phillip’s brother Sandy goes to live with a family in Kentucky as part of a Federal program to integrate Jews into American society. I would have loved to see a discussion of all of this. The other problem I had with the show was historical. While Charles Lindbergh’s anti-Semitism was accurately portrayed, he never advocated policies like those carried out in the show. FDR is portrayed as a savior in the show even though he was no friend of the Jews. While he never advocated such policies either, he did carry them out something worse against Japanese-Americans at the same time he made little effort to help the Jews fleeing Nazism. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-irony-of-the-plot-against-america/
Secondly, I can’t help wondering why the Kennedy’s left out? Joseph Kennedy was a virulent anti-Semite, politically active, and a correspondent with Lindbergh. Kennedy was at least as well-known as Henry Ford, also a Democrat, and would have been a perfect addition to the Lindbergh cabinet. Lastly, a minor complaint, but unless I missed it the show never explains why we didn’t go to war with Japan. The book mentions something about a diplomatic resolution (good news for all those Japanese-Americans who wouldn’t be relocated to ‘internment camps’). One could argue that this is a show for our times, that previous nuanced Simon-Woods shows were for a time when we ‘less divided’. I’m skeptical that we’re more divided than we were in the 1960’s (let alone the 1860’s), but for the sake of argument I’ll accept that. In that case the last thing we need is a show where everything is black and white and propagates the lazy thinking of us against them. Even if we are divided, there are hundreds of different points of views on many different sides that Simon and Woods could have colored in for us as they’ve done so well in the past.
The mini-series ends with the possibility of a sequel, though that seems unlikely. If there is a second season, I only hope the creators will return to their roots and redeem a middling effort. But at this point I can only recommend this show if you are, like I was, laid up in Quarantine with an interest in history and having run out of all the many other better shows to watch.… Expand

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