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There’s no denying that the new season is an often painful allegory of our times. It might be the perfect time for anyone who hasn’t seen it to start the catch-up process.
#CASTLE SEASON 5 DVD REVIEW SERIES#
In that sense, new showrunner Eric Overmyer ( The Wire, Treme, Bosch) is now presiding over a long-delayed bid to expand the reach and influence of a series (whose core audience is large enough that Amazon already has renewed it for a fourth season). A staggering 22-month delay unfolded before the Oct. It’s a creative decision that’s so keenly right as to seem like the most obvious thing to do, but it also comes after a period when the creative dynamics of the show were in such peril that it operated without series creator and showrunner Frank Spotnitz, who stepped away during production of season two. (Season one of The Handmaid’s Tale was often and erroneously seen as a reaction to Trump, but it was created before his election, so it was more a matter of accidental timing - though season two clearly leaned into some of the more totalitarian parallels, along with the main theme of female oppression.)Ĭlearly sensing an opportunity, The Man in the High Castle has smartly seized the moment to align itself in a more pronounced way with the fear, despair and, increasingly, the sense that a change to the narrative of horror might actually be on the horizon. Oh, there were countervailing voices, mostly in late-night comedy, that were having a field day, but as for scripted television, not much was delivered. But the series that I once hoped would spring up as logical (and necessary) counterpoints to the onslaught of Trump tweets, stunning revelations of foreign interference in American affairs, possible treasonous acts and the rising tide of nationalism never really materialized. The culture war that existed well before Trump’s election has never been more divisive. It had potential to put things together, but was somehow out of the zeitgeist.ĭepending on where you fall on the political spectrum - and if you’re in the Trump camp, you’re not going to like where this is going - the resulting horror show that fractured this country even further was a daily dose of depressing headlines that hasn’t abated. Yet it was also Amazon’s most watched original series. If you freeze The Man in the High Castle at that moment, it was an ambitious and intriguing drama, but not quite a critically successful one. It did, however, cement an approach to the complicated storytelling through its “multiverse,” a genre device that it uses effectively to explain the differences between the histories seen in proliferating newsreels and the one the characters are living.Īt that point, alternative history or not, it was fantasy - a television series that couldn’t even be called a diversion from what was building in real life because the shock and enormity of that wasn’t yet comprehended. The second season, which ramped up the complexities of the story and fleshed out the characters, was compelling but more uneven. The first season was good but didn’t set its hook in the public consciousness.
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#CASTLE SEASON 5 DVD REVIEW TV#
Thirteen more months went by before Amazon Studios released the second season - certainly not a lifetime in the industry, but while Amazon was still finding its way, Peak TV diverted attention to hundreds of other series. The advent of CGI and a deep-pocketed streaming service changed that, of course. That chill was the obvious intention of Dick’s book but, until then, it was a story considered unfilmable because of what would have been needed to create the visuals. It was unnerving, even then, to consider such an alternative history. With its rampant images of Nazi propaganda, intimidation and fear on one side of the country and the brutal Rising Sun crackdown on the other, the show cast a chilling spell even in January 2015, when Amazon first made the pilot available. Part of the intrigue of the first season, particularly for those who had never read Dick’s 1962 Hugo Award-winning novel, was trying to figure out how the newsreel footage could jibe with what was going on in the story. There’s a small resistance movement that suffers relentless defeats, for the most part, but which maintains its motivation and optimism through an underground film reel showing that the Allies actually won the war. Dick’s alternative history novel of the same name, envisions a world where the United States lost World War II and the country is divided, with Nazi Germany running most of the East Coast and Middle America and, on the other side of a small neutral zone, Japan running the West Coast.