The Plot Against Amer­i­ca makes for stark view­ing in uncer­tain times

In their lat­est ven­ture into the HBO sphere, The Wire co-writ­ers David Simon and Ed Burns aban­don the streets of Bal­ti­more once again, this time in explo­ration of an alter­nate Amer­i­can real­i­ty – one in which Ger­many wins World War Two. As the Amer­i­can peo­ple watch scenes of Hitler danc­ing through the ruins of what was once Paris – like a ​“hap­py Putz” – the close-knit Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty of Newark is start­ing to feel nervous.

The Levin fam­i­ly are liv­ing a life of 1940s lux­u­ry com­pared to many oth­ers still strug­gling to make ends meet. Where the cor­ner boys’ warn­ing call ​“5:0!” dom­i­nat­ed the streets of The Wire, the chil­dren of The Plot Against Amer­i­ca announce the arrival of their fathers after a long day’s work with ​“car!” By draw­ing atten­tion to these upper-class nuances, Minkie Spiro, direc­tor of the pre­mière episode, sets us up for what’s to come. Over the course of one night, indi­vid­ual and insti­tu­tion­al racism spikes by sev­er­al degrees, and the life fam­i­lies like the Levins have painstak­ing­ly built over many years are about to change drastically.

Adapt­ed from Philip Roth’s 2004 nov­el of the same name, The Plot Against Amer­i­ca imag­ines a Trump-esque fig­ure run­ning for the US pres­i­den­cy against Franklin D Roo­sevelt. Xeno­pho­bic pop­ulist Charles Lind­bergh (Ben Cole) turns the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion against Jew­ish and British com­mu­ni­ties, insist­ing on their being war-agi­ta­tors, and threat­en­ing depor­ta­tion. All the while, news chan­nels show footage of Jew­ish men, women, and chil­dren being shipped off to con­cen­tra­tion camps in Hitler’s Germany.

While Her­man Levin (Mor­gan Spec­tor) and the neigh­bour­ing men air their frus­tra­tions and fears on the stoop, his wife Bess (Zoe Kazan) tries her best to keep this sense of mount­ing dread from their teenaged sons Sandy (Caleb Malis) and the much younger Philip (Azhy Robert­son). Spec­tor and Kazan’s on-screen chem­istry feels nat­ur­al. It’s easy for the audi­ence to feel com­fort­able with the Levin fam­i­ly, to become enthralled by their multi­gen­er­a­tional din­ner set­tings and their con­cerns regard­ing the state of the world and how to pro­tect their chil­dren and oth­er rel­a­tives from it.

Per­haps the most intrigu­ing sto­ry arc in the show’s pre­mière episode is Philip’s grad­ual expo­sure to an adult world and feel­ings of oth­er­ness he was pre­vi­ous­ly shel­tered from. From ques­tions of jus­tice and moral­i­ty sur­round­ing his uncle’s shady friends and pas­times, to recog­nis­ing and feel­ing intim­i­dat­ed by the world­li­ness of oth­er kids his age, it seems Philip is sud­den­ly look­ing at a whole new world. Robertson’s per­for­mance is unforced, awak­en­ing a parental instinct in the view­er – one that wants to pre­serve his inno­cence and stop his wide-eyed won­der from turn­ing into a pic­ture of con­stant terror.

Like oth­er recent dystopi­an dra­mas such as The Handmaid’s Tale, The Plot Against Amer­i­ca is zoom­ing in on the sur­re­al­ism of time and exis­tence. How, from one day to the next, the hate­ful clown wreak­ing hav­oc in the cir­cus that is soci­ety can con­vert an entire coun­try through tele­vi­sion screens and radio waves, chang­ing the world as we know it for­ev­er and for the worse. It’s a study in how dif­fer­ent par­ties react to sud­den changes in the polit­i­cal cli­mate, and how to pre­pare a new gen­er­a­tion for an uncer­tain future with­out unin­ten­tion­al­ly manip­u­lat­ing their present.