Perhaps this is because, as his wife Bess (Zoe Kazan) suggests, he has grown up in a Jewish neighbourhood, shielded from the common, casual prejudice of the outside world. Herman Levin (Morgan Spector, who occasionally seems as if he’s acting in a slightly less sophisticated production than everyone else, though not enough to weaken what is a great cast) is an energetic optimist. The drama takes its time establishing the utter normality of the Levins, including all the imperfections and tensions along whose lines the family will begin to crack. Slowly, as people repeatedly point out today, it comes. There is an air of danger which, little by little, suffuses every area of the characters’ lives, through a politics that preys on people’s post-Depression insecurities and fears. Working on a smaller canvas than usual – a family, the Levins in New Jersey, is the point of departure rather than a police department (The Wire, Homicide: Life on the Streets), neighbourhood (The Corner, Treme) or an entire industry (The Deuce) – Simon and Burns are able to fill their latest creation with a more intimate sense of foreboding and jeopardy. Roth always insisted that his story about aviation hero Charles Lindbergh beating Roosevelt in the 1940 election was not a political allegory. But they have, and David Simon’s and Ed Burns’s six part HBO series has reached our shores.

W e may never know what prompted two of the most sociopolitically concerned writers in modern television history to turn at this precise juncture to adapting Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America, which imagines an America that has elected a populist celebrity demagogue as president and begins to slide towards fascism.

The plot against america roth