Confederate, a Civil War dystopia from the Game of Thrones creators, is already controversial

The Game of Thrones showrunners are no strangers to controversy, but with the recent announcement of their next project, Confederate, they may now be actively courting it.

Per HBO’s July 19 press release, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’s 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.”

There’s no doubt that Benioff and Weiss and HBO were keen to figure out what was next for the Game of Thrones team, and the fact that the answer is basically Civil War alternate-universe fanfiction is, to say the least, an unexpected decision. Not only is Confederate a hugely ambitious idea, but it’s the kind of concept that requires incredible deftness and sensitivity — a combination some are skeptical that this team and this network can pull off.

For their part, Benioff and Weiss stated that they’ve been thinking about the idea for Confederate for years as a possible movie, but that their “experience on Thrones has convinced us that no one provides a bigger, better storytelling canvas than HBO.” And in a fascinating interview with Vulture’s Josef Adalian — published late Thursday night — the two insisted alongside executive producers Nichelle Tramble Spellman (Justified, The Good Wife) and Malcolm Spellman (Empire, Hulu’s upcoming Foxy Brown series) that they don’t take this concept, or its history, lightly.

“It goes without saying slavery is the worst thing that ever happened in American history,” said Weiss. “It’s our original sin as a nation. And history doesn’t disappear.”

Benioff and Weiss say they aren’t surprised by the pushback to Confederate, nor are the Spellmans. But the fact that HBO granted Vulture an unusual damage-control interview following the response to the initial press release indicates that the network wasn’t quite prepared for the vehement reaction it got, which is maybe the biggest surprise of all.

Plenty of works of fiction have tackled the myriad possible outcomes of major wars, with some even imagining the kind of alternate reality Confederate is set to take on. As many were quick to point out after the Confederate announcement, Amazon’s Man in the High Castle imagines a world in which the Nazis won World War II — though it might also be important to note that Man in the High Castle, as my colleague Todd VanDerWerff has pointed out, is a total mess. Another (better) example from recent memory is probably Ben Winters’s recent acclaimed novel Underground Airlines, which imagines that the Civil War never happened, leaving slavery to be folded into modern society along with every other industry.

So, yes, there are absolutely ways to examine history by posing “what if” questions, to find new truths by examining old ones in a different light. And Weiss put this approach front and center in the Vulture interview, calling Confederate “science fiction” and saying that the genre “can show us how this history is still with us in a way no strictly realistic drama ever could.”

But those warily eying HBO’s announcement of Confederate don’t believe the team behind Game of Thrones will consider the implications of the history it’s taken on with enough nuance to make it worth the inevitable trouble.

Other critics, like Vulture’s own Hunter Harris, have ripped the show’s premise as obfuscating the grim realities of the systemic racism that has existed before, during, and long after the Civil War:

To be blunt: It was difficult to read the sentence, “HBO announces Confederate, a new drama series created by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss,” and not immediately translate it to, “HBO announces Confederate, a new drama series about modern-day slavery created by two white guys.” While Game of Thrones’ stories are wide-ranging and complex, the fact remains — as many have insisted before and after this announcement — that the show’s treatment of race isn’t exactly encouraging.

“Pretty much the only black people in Game of Thrones are slaves,” Ira Madison writes at the Daily Beast, adding that Game of Thrones’ track record on depictions of sexual assault is similarly uninspiring. “Do we need another show from them where the black people are slaves and the threat of rape from slaveowners is ever-present?”

When Adalian asked Benioff and Weiss about the backlash to how they’ve treated race on Game of Thrones, Weiss instead emphasized that they are “very hyper aware of the difference between a show with a fictional history and a fictional world, and a show that’s an alternate history of this world.”

On the one hand, this demonstrates that they’re taking the very real history and pain of the Civil War seriously. On the other, it fails to acknowledge that Game of Thrones deliberately draws from real history to shade out its world — and that the show doesn’t exist in a vacuum, fantasy or no.

The one aspect of Confederate that has early critics breathing a tentative sigh of relief, however, is that Benioff and Weiss are being joined by the Spellmans as executive producers, so the creatives involved won’t be all white men. In fact, their partnership was heavily emphasized throughout that Vulture interview, with Malcolm insisting that he and Nichelle are “not props being used to protect someone else.” Furthermore, he continued, Confederate will be “deeply personal” for them, “because we are the offspring of this history. We deal with it directly, and have for our entire lives.”

Nichelle agreed, adding that while she understood the concern, she was disappointed that it came so swiftly and wished it “had been reserved to the night of the premiere, on HBO, on a Sunday night, when they watched and then they made a decision after they watched an hour of television as to whether or not we succeeded in what we set out to do.”

Nichelle’s comments underline the trouble with writing off Confederate this early in its existence: As of now, there’s no indication of who will be anchoring the show in front of the cameras. And Benioff, expressing frustration at the preemptive criticism, emphasized to Vulture that they “don’t even have character names ... everything is brand new and nothing’s been written.”

The Confederate press release does promise “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.” So while it seems like Confederate will be some kind of sprawling epic in the vein of Game of Thrones, it’s still unclear how the show will strike a balance between white and black perspectives.

Throughout the Vulture interview, Benioff and Weiss constantly defer to the Spellmans, who in turn emphasize their trust in the Game of Thrones team to treat this new concept with the gravity it deserves. Given how closely the criticism they’ve already gotten aligns with the broader discussion about representation and race in entertainment today, it’s not surprising how quickly HBO scrambled to acknowledge that the optics of giving two successful white men a show about the Confederate South are, to say the least, less than ideal.

Recent years have seen pop culture ranging from indie TV shows to blockbuster superhero movies try to incorporate “more diverse” casts, or at least attempt to fold in perspectives other than entertainment’s default (i.e., straight, white, and male). And that’s repeatedly proven to be a successful approach: Movies like Get Out, Hidden Figures, and Wonder Woman, for example, have broken through the glut of monochromatic big-budget mediocrities to achieve huge box office success.

HBO has followed suit, ordering shows like Issa Rae’s Insecure and the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls to series in order to shake up its traditionally white status quo. (And for all those who were just tempted to close this article and email me about The Wire, please at least note that it’s definitely the exception rather than the rule for the network.)

Along the way to inclusivity, however, there has also been significant controversy over the question of who, exactly, should be trying to take on these “diverse” stories. For one, Sofia Coppola’s remake of The Beguiled — which takes place in the Confederate South and stars Nicole Kidman and Kirsten Dunst — recently came under so much fire for excising the original movie’s storyline about a black slave girl that Coppola responded to the criticism multiple times. She first stated to BuzzFeed that she was “really focused on just this one group of [white] women who were really isolated”; she later wrote a piece for Indiewire about how she wanted to tell a story of white women’s repression, and that treating slavery as a side plot “would be insulting.”

On that point, the Daily Beast’s Madison basically agreed — but not necessarily because the plot line had no place in The Beguiled at all. Instead, he wrote, “there’s also a lot to be said about a white woman who stays in her lane,” arguing that he would much rather let black filmmakers tell black stories than have white people take on the task for diversity’s sake.

“Gone are the days when we needed a Steven Spielberg to make a film like The Color Purple or a George Lucas to back Red Tails,” Madison continued. “We should demand that studios and producers give those opportunities to black filmmakers instead of looking for meager scraps from white people who don’t fully grasp our stories and will portray them horribly.”

To this point, the fact that the initial HBO announcement failed to adequately highlight just how involved the Spellmans will be in the crafting of this alternate history shows that the network might not have understood the implications of the nascent show it was celebrating. If it had, it would have taken care to point out that there are black creatives heavily involved in this work — and not just presented it as “Game of Thrones: Civil War edition.”

Confederate is still in its embryonic stages, and won’t even start production until after Game of Thrones has wrapped. But at minimum, it seems as though the concern people have about this fraught concept has made it through to those in charge of digging up the country’s most painful roots to build out Confederate’s alternate universe.