I love the narrative that a few have about "what if slavery existed" as a show. White people will hold circle jerks when it airs on sundays because they want to see dystopian fiction that is about a racist society.
They don't realize that such a show is easily made into a critical expy of how they picture the Trump Administration in that it's a racist regressive society with leaders who are focused on expanding the "peculiar institution" in order to maintain its legitimacy, which in reality had Southerners eyeing Cuba and the northern states of Mexico as further land to grab and expand into. With an "ideal" America sitting next door to the North that can easily be a progressive wet dream without the bigoted South attached dragging it down with their electoral votes and population.
If the show did any research it would also have to grapple with a society where
whites were the minority by far who held all power, with blacks and Hispanics regulated to at best second-class citizenry, at worse slavery. At the time of the Civil War, South Carolina was like 2/3rds black, and it's not the whites whose population would be increasing rapidly for the next 150 years to the point of the series. Slavery was not kind to aging well and it required young hands. And again, this is all with a perfect America sitting next door endlessly siphoning the power and wealth of the Confederacy, not to mention fugitive slaves would be one hell of a serious problem if the Northern states were hostile and complicit in assisting rather than in the real world where they aided the recapture of slaves to return them to the South. They'll have to take some leaps to justify the society continuing to exist into the present day, but I can't imagine it's portrayed as a good place to live for anyone unless they outright reject history. The Confederacy was massively rural and sparsely populated, it shouldn't have bustling metropolises if it stayed a primarily plantation based economy.
It seems weird to somehow determine the show is instantly racist or pro-slavery before it even casts anyone, or dismiss it as a white power fantasy. Aren't they demanding more politics in our media? Isn't this ideal? There's no grey area (except the uniforms of the Confederates) in the racism of the characters to hide in, they support chattel slavery ffs! They'll be able to post all kinds of gifs that parallel Trump or Republicans or the alt-right like they do with
Handmaidens Tale [insert popular tv/film fiction of the moment]!
spoiler (click to show/hide)
I read Harry Turtledove's silly Southern Victory series long ago that has the same proposed divergence point as this series, that Lee's plans for Antietam aren't discovered. And that was mostly silly because it turned everyone into expy's for 20th century European powers rather than ever grappling with what the South was actually like at the time of the war and would be post-war. Although he did have the Confederacy expand into Cuba and Mexico in the 1880s or so.
That series ended with the Confederates literally becoming the Nazi's and nuclear bombs dropped on Southern cities as the slave uprisings turned into Black-Soviet Communism. ERA's dumbest reactionary "progressives" would get off so hard.
