HBO’s Game of Thrones is winding its way down, with fans eager to see how the show’s remaining mysteries will be solved. (Will the White Walkers make their way down to King’s Landing? Will Ed Sheeran’s charming soldier come back?) In the meantime, the show’s creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have announced their new show for HBO: Confederate, a show that’s set in an alternate history where the South won the Civil War, and successfully seceded from the Union. Here’s how a press release describes it, per Entertainment Weekly:
CONFEDERATE chronicles the events leading to the Third American Civil War. The series takes place in an alternate timeline, where the southern states have successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution. The story follows a broad swath of characters on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone – freedom fighters, slave hunters, politicians, abolitionists, journalists, the executives of a slave-holding conglomerate and the families of people in their thrall.
While “imagine our world but worse” is perhaps not the art everyone needs right now, there’s fertile material in the subject. The Man in the High Castle, the Philip K. Dick-novel-turned-Amazon-show, is set in an alternate world where the Nazis won; East of West, an incredible Image comic, is set in a world where the Civil War never ended. Then again, those properties didn’t feature the literal return of slavery, which feels a bit taboo in a world where the Donald Trump presidency is trying to keep refugees out of the country and strip rights away from its own citizens.
No release date for Confederate has been announced, though it’s supposed to begin production when Game of Thrones is over. Thrones has one more season after this one, which will likely air in 2018 or 2019.
