What If? Experimental History on Television

Amazon Prime’s The Man in the High Castle (2015–2019) is representative of the experimental approaches to history that have appeared in great numbers during the era of Peak television. Based on Philip K. Dick’s alternate history novel, the show takes place in a version of 1962 where the Axis powers won the Second World War and the United States has been split into three separate zones. The series’ embrace of fiction does not hinder its ability to engage in historical discourse but, instead, facilitates it. While many historians and scholars tend to be critical of film and television’s ability to sweep the audience up in the emotion and drama of the past and offer simplistic and outright inaccurate interpretations, The Man in the High Castle counteracts such critiques by constantly making the audience aware of the fabricated nature of what they are watching. Transporting an examination of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and mid-century America to an alternate reality forces viewers to recall what they know and hold it up against what they see on screen. Audiences are encouraged to grapple with complex questions about contingency and determinism, while identifying similarities and differences in the historical record.