What you think about the HBO adap­ta­tion of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against Amer­i­ca will depend on whether or not the name David Simon means any­thing to you.

If you’ve nev­er heard of him, then you will very prob­a­bly find the six part mini-series per­fect­ly divert­ing. Roth’s nov­el imag­ines a dystopi­an, coun­ter­fac­tu­al past in which FDR does not win his third term in 1940, and is instead defeat­ed by the celebri­ty du jour and would-be fas­cist Charles Lind­bergh.

Lind­bergh helped set up The Amer­i­ca First Com­mit­tee to pro­mote Amer­i­can iso­la­tion­ism and keep them out of the Sec­ond World War. Cham­pi­oning white suprema­cy and blam­ing the Jews for try­ing to involve Amer­i­ca in a Euro­pean fra­cas, he not only refused to con­demn the Nazis, he’d trav­elled to Ger­many in 1938 where he was award­ed, and proud­ly accept­ed, the Ser­vice Cross of the Ger­man Eagle from Her­mann Göring.

So it’s not hard to see what drew Simon to the source mate­r­i­al. But, dis­ap­point­ing­ly, the series fails ulti­mate­ly to take flight. And it fails on two counts. 

First, as every school­boy knows, the best books make the worst films. And what works so well in the nov­el is the way in which Roth gets inside the young Philip’s head to give us a child’s‑eye view of the world he finds him­self in. So that the polit­i­cal back­drop is pre­cise­ly that, a backdrop.

The book’s one fail­ing, with­out wish­ing to give any­thing away, is that rather than move towards a dra­mat­ic crescen­do, plot wise, it just sort of fiz­zles out. 

Nec­es­sar­i­ly, in order to visu­alise the book, the pro­gramme mak­ers decid­ed to flesh out the polit­i­cal sub-plots in lieu of being able to drama­tise what is essen­tial­ly an inner mono­logue. But all that does is to high­light how lit­er­ary the nov­el is, and how impos­si­ble it was always going to be to try to adapt it for the screen.

Sec­ond, and very sur­pris­ing­ly, it is, dia­logue-wise, incred­i­bly clunky. Every­body says exact­ly that they are think­ing, and char­ac­ters are for­ev­er spout­ing expo­si­tion and telling us, in case we missed it, what to think.

One episode begins with the father ask­ing his friend why the local police aren’t pro­tect­ing the Jews from the neigh­bour­hood vig­i­lantes. To which he replies: 

“Not many Jews on the Newark Police Force.”

“But that shouldn’t be the point”, the father says earnest­ly, empha­sis­ing the word shouldn’t, in case we’d missed it’s import. And so on.

What’s so espe­cial­ly dis­ap­point­ing about this is that this is the pro­gramme mak­er and the team who brought us The Wire. Rarely had dia­logue been less on the nose.

There isn’t space here to look in more detail at what Simon has done since then. Suf­fice it to say, his out­put sub­se­quent­ly has looked increas­ing­ly con­ser­v­a­tive, and The Wire is look­ing more and more like some­thing of an anomaly. 

After The Wire and Treme, skip­ping del­i­cate­ly over Gen­er­a­tion Kill, the con­ser­vatism of Show Me A Hero, reviewed ear­li­er here, came across as refresh­ing. But The Deuce, not with­stand­ing its sub­ject mat­ter, was every bit as con­ven­tion­al. And now this.

All of which is a shame. Because the show is actu­al­ly pret­ty good at imag­in­ing what it must be like for mem­bers of a minor­i­ty com­mu­ni­ty to live their nor­mal lives, as the coun­try they think of as their own turns inex­plic­a­bly against them.

This Plot Against Amer­i­ca isn’t a bad show. The dia­logue is no more clunky than in the vast major­i­ty of shows you’re like­ly to sit through. And it looks every bit as rav­ish­ing as you’d expect of a mod­ern day peri­od piece. But I do hope we’re not going to have to re-eval­u­ate Simon’s out­put. The medi­um needs its heroes.

You can see the trail­er for The Plot Against Amer­i­ca here

Sign up for a sub­scrip­tion right or below, and I shall keep you post­ed every month on All the very Best and Worst in film, tele­vi­sion and music!