'The Man In the High Castle' Review: Nazi America Never Looked So Good

The 1960s America as created by The Man In The High Castle, now streaming on Amazon Prime, is a richly-conceived yet bland one, and I mean that as a compliment. In this universe, the Nazis won World War II, and so our country is shrouded in the gray of totalitarian imagery, the dark uniforms of the ruling elite, the gloomy clouds under which citizens of our formerly united, now fractured, states exist in meek, bleak despair.

As the series begins in 1962, one of the most popular shows on TV is American Reich, this alternate-world’s version of Dragnet, the great Jack Webb cop show. In this 1962, however, it is unlikely that Bob Dylan was in New York City recording The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (as he was in the ‘62 we know) — there’s not much freewheeling living in what High Castle labels “Greater Nazi Reich, N.Y.” (Though I’ll bet ? and the Mysterians do come together to form their band in the High Castle universe, as they did in ours, since both worlds need the haunting wail of “96 Tears” desperately.)

There isn’t hope, but there is resistance. A young woman, Juliana (Alexa Davalos), is in possession of a canister of celluloid film that “shows another world” — presumably a world of freedom, one in which the Allies won the War. It’s a film made by the mysterious Man in the High Castle, whose identity is unknown but whose outreach is growing: Juliana has been entrusted with carrying the film across the country to increase its distribution. A handsome young man, Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), is similarly stirred up and looking to upend the dictatorship shared by Nazi Germany and the Japanese stronghold (the Pacific States of America) that has secured the West Coast.

Based on the famous Philip K. Dick novel of the same name and adapted for television by Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files), the ten-episode first season of The Man in the High Castle is a visually enthralling spectacle (Times Square never looked so clean and orderly!) that is a little weak on character development. Part of that is not the show’s fault — it’s built into the science fiction of even a highly imaginative writer such as Dick: character is nearly always secondary to concept. Thus Juliana and Joe are appealing but rather bland, vessels for the messages the show wants to convey.

The villains are more interesting. There’s a grumpy bounty hunter played by Burn Gorman wearing a black duster coat beneath which he pulls a sawed-off shotgun — he’s like an avenger out of a Western. Even better is Rufus Sewell’s excellent portrayal of Obergruppenführer John Smith, a Nazi official trying to root out the ever-growing Resistance movement. Sewell manages to convey crisply efficient evil while also being convincing as a family man who presides over a suburban household straight out of Leave It To Beaver, but with swastikas.

I must confess that I’ve never been completely sold on the genius of Dick, a sci-fi eccentric admired by many other writers I admire more (Jonathan Lethem, who edited the Library of America’s Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s, among them). I’m simply not drawn to that genre of fiction predicated on the idea — as a character says here in the third episode — “Did you ever think how different life would be if you could change just one thing?”

To me, that’s pretty much all of sci-fi in a nutshell, and while I recognize that there’s a huge audience of people — probably including you, and certainly Frank Spotnitz — who like to spin out what happens when you change one significant thing (in this case, Nazis-won-the-War) and develop entire, contrasting worlds around it, that kind of exercise leads me a little cold. And so, while I know I’m not going to be a huge fan of it, I admire The Man in the High Castle: It’s extremely well-made — well-directed, exceedingly well-designed. I recommend it.

The Man in the High Castle is streaming on Amazon Prime.