In news we’ve seen coming for over two years, HBO programming president Casey Bloys has told TV Line that Confederate is not moving forward.
The drama was to be headed up by Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss together with husband-and-wife team Nichelle Tramble Spellman (Justified, The Good Wife) and Malcolm Spellman (Empire). It was to be set in a sideways version of the United States of America where the north and south fought the Civil War to a standstill, and where slavery had developed in the Confederacy into a modern-day institution.
Immediately, people lambasted the idea as tone-deaf and wrong-headed. HBO tried to do some damage control, but this show never had a chance of seeing the light of day. This is the official death kneel, but anyone could have seen it coming, especially after Benioff and Weiss signed a lucrative deal with Netflix after shopping themselves around Hollywood for awhile. The only real curiosity is that it took HBO this long to confirm what everyone else already suspected.
Overall, it’s probably best for everyone that HBO let this show quietly die. Even if it went forward and somehow ended up being a hit, its reputation would precede it.
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