ep review of new series
.
The SPIKE Channel airs lots of things, such as Deadliest Warrior (who would win a fight between Lawrence of Arabia and Teddy Roosevelt?) and Manswers and various movies and wrestling/kickboxing programs.
And now they have added the series Alternate History to their line-up. This half-hour program's opening credits says it will explore various "what-ifs?" of history... such as:
* What if the President survived? (i assume they mean Kennedy)
* What if the South won the Civil War?
* What if the Dinosaurs had never not died out?
The episodes are peppered with testimony from experts - intelligence officers, soldiers, the founder of Wikipedia, and others.
Their pilot episode went right for the jugular: 'What if Hitler had won WW2?' and demonstrates a mix of what I hope they continue to do, and what I hope they stop doing.
The good parts:
* They clearly labeled which aspects were true (such as Nazi research and the control practiced by totalitarian governments), vs which aspects were part of the new timeline.
* Rather than give a vague handwave of "what if the Nazis won?" without saying how, the show manages to pick a point in the War which gives the Nazis a victory which gives them the breathing space to work on their atom bomb.
The "wait, what?" parts:
* They had experts say that life in Nazi America would be the same as life in the Warsaw Pact of our history.
The bad parts:
* The show demonstrates a flair for the dramatic and sensational...such launching V2 rockets off the coast of New York and Boston (plausible), and when those rockets' nukes strike, the USA instantly surrenders and adopts the Nazi lifestyle 100% (despite, you know, having different ethnic compositions, being bigger than the entire Nazi empire, and a little precedent that at least the show's writers should have remembered: Pearl Harbor)
* They assume the Nazi state will survive - at least in the US, if not in Germany - for 70 years after the end of WW2...despite the fact that the word for what the Nazis did to their country is called autocannibalism, and thus likely would not have lasted more than 20 or 30 years, tops.
then again, that sort of speculation may be outside their remit.
I'll give it a try next week, and see if it gets better.
The SPIKE Channel airs lots of things, such as Deadliest Warrior (who would win a fight between Lawrence of Arabia and Teddy Roosevelt?) and Manswers and various movies and wrestling/kickboxing programs.
And now they have added the series Alternate History to their line-up. This half-hour program's opening credits says it will explore various "what-ifs?" of history... such as:
* What if the President survived? (i assume they mean Kennedy)
* What if the South won the Civil War?
* What if the Dinosaurs had never not died out?
The episodes are peppered with testimony from experts - intelligence officers, soldiers, the founder of Wikipedia, and others.
Their pilot episode went right for the jugular: 'What if Hitler had won WW2?' and demonstrates a mix of what I hope they continue to do, and what I hope they stop doing.
The good parts:
* They clearly labeled which aspects were true (such as Nazi research and the control practiced by totalitarian governments), vs which aspects were part of the new timeline.
* Rather than give a vague handwave of "what if the Nazis won?" without saying how, the show manages to pick a point in the War which gives the Nazis a victory which gives them the breathing space to work on their atom bomb.
The "wait, what?" parts:
* They had experts say that life in Nazi America would be the same as life in the Warsaw Pact of our history.
The bad parts:
* The show demonstrates a flair for the dramatic and sensational...such launching V2 rockets off the coast of New York and Boston (plausible), and when those rockets' nukes strike, the USA instantly surrenders and adopts the Nazi lifestyle 100% (despite, you know, having different ethnic compositions, being bigger than the entire Nazi empire, and a little precedent that at least the show's writers should have remembered: Pearl Harbor)
* They assume the Nazi state will survive - at least in the US, if not in Germany - for 70 years after the end of WW2...despite the fact that the word for what the Nazis did to their country is called autocannibalism, and thus likely would not have lasted more than 20 or 30 years, tops.
then again, that sort of speculation may be outside their remit.
I'll give it a try next week, and see if it gets better.