The Plot Against America - "This is still America and I want my day in court."

This is a new miniseries from HBO that I started to watch because I saw its trailer before watching Westworld's season 3 premiere a few weeks ago. It only has 6 episodes and the story advances very slowly, but I think the point of the story is how totalitarianism and radicalism can slowly take over a society and eventually wreak havoc and destroy people's lives.

This show has a good cast, with well-known faces like Wynona Ryder and Zoe Kazan. These 2 will play the role of 2 Jewish sisters with slightly different lives. The younger one, played by Kazan has her own family with 2 children. Ryder's character is single and is a bit riskier when it comes to finding a companion.

The story revolves around a family (Kazan's character, her husband and the children) and several secondary characters such as a cousin, and 2 kids from nearby houses. All of them are Jewish living in 1940 in America and scared about the possibility of antisemitism controlling their country and hurting them.

Right from the beginning of the show, we see small examples of hatred towards Jews and how this gradually increase the nervousness of the 2 parents. In this alternative timeline, American elections have different results. The president ends up being a person who isn't explicitly anti-Nazi which makes the Jewish population feel under threat.

The intensity of the situation becomes higher and higher as the episodes advance, with a few fistfights here and there, and a lot of family issues. The country and freedoms are crumbling but some people aren't able to notice it while others are on the brings of losing their minds.

There is a lot of drama in this series, especially in the last episode which was my favorite one. As most HBO shows, this series is of good quality but its slow pace undermines its potential. The payoff, in the end, wasn't really that great and the ending itself was ambiguous. Nevertheless, I don't regret watching this series, it was interesting.

The best

• Excellent dramatic performances from the cast.
• Intense and dramatic final episode.

The worst

• Despite being a short series, it wasn't always intense and it sometimes felt slow.
• I am interested in seeing more productions about the dangers of socialism/communism and the extremist from the left than the already long time defeated and broadly rejected fascism or national socialism.

More information: https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/83870-the-plot-against-america
Review: AAA
In numbers: 7.5/10