THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE
Amazon Prime Video, 12:00 a.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: Unless you count Season 2 of FX’s Fargo as a brand-new series (which you shouldn’t, because it’s a rebooted anthology show), The Man in the High Castle deserves credit as the best new show of the season. That’s on broadcast, cable or streaming TV – and even that’s not high enough praise, because the fall 2015 season has been a relatively crummy one. But this new series, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick (whose sci-fi stories have inspired such films as Blade Runner and Total Recall), is as interesting as it is unusual. It imagines an alternate history in which the Allies lost World War II, with the Japanese and Nazis dividing up the spoils of the continental United States. It’s 1962, and a trio of young characters are drawn, for various reasons, into the underground resistance movement. For a full review, see my Bianculli’s Blog, or visit the Fresh Air website to read and hear my review on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. And for more, read Ed Bark’s Uncle Barky’s Bytes.