WI: Southern Victory Mini-Series

I've noticed a lot of threads dealing with alternate TV-shows popping up lately, and this made me think of the series of books that got me into AH. What if after the success of Band of Brothers on HBO in 2001, Showtime decides to try and come up with a copycat mini-series and ends up stumbling upon Harry Turtledove's Southern Victory series and gets the rights to produce a mini-series based on the series? How does this effect AH in the mainstream?
 
I've noticed a lot of threads dealing with alternate TV-shows popping up lately, and this made me think of the series of books that got me into AH. What if after the success of Band of Brothers on HBO in 2001, Showtime decides to try and come up with a copycat mini-series and ends up stumbling upon Harry Turtledove's Southern Victory series and gets the rights to produce a mini-series based on the series? How does this effect AH in the mainstream?

Depends entirely on how they approach the back story, since only the people who have read "Southern victory" are otherwise going to understand it.
 
I don't see it. Whether true or not, I suspect the TV moguls would decide that the American TV audience would lack any identification with such a detailed alternate world, especially one that would require some knowledge of real history and also step on so many PC and non-PC toes.

I think something like Worldwar might be more likely. Not only are alien invasions somewhat in vogue, but having one happen in WW2 with the aliens not being so superior as to be invincible might work. The situation in Poland and with the Jews would be tricky, however, and such a show would probably be designed to focus solely on events in the US.
 
I don't see it. Whether true or not, I suspect the TV moguls would decide that the American TV audience would lack any identification with such a detailed alternate world, especially one that would require some knowledge of real history and also step on so many PC and non-PC toes.

I think something like Worldwar might be more likely. Not only are alien invasions somewhat in vogue, but having one happen in WW2 with the aliens not being so superior as to be invincible might work. The situation in Poland and with the Jews would be tricky, however, and such a show would probably be designed to focus solely on events in the US.

We read the same Southern Victory series, right? In my opinion, learning about a sailor's zinc oxide habit doesn't cut mustard as historical information. The non-PC side of the argument I agree with. What producers would greenlight a project where it portrays half of American viewers as possibly being genocidal?
 
We read the same Southern Victory series, right? In my opinion, learning about a sailor's zinc oxide habit doesn't cut mustard as historical information.

True, but to appreciate the series the reader has to be both interested in actual history and informed enough to appreciate how the TL-191 backstory differs from OTL ... and more imporantly to care. You are certainly right that, to make it work as a miniseries, scriptwriters would have to take a hacksaw to Turtledove's repetitions and duplicate POV characters.
 
Top