Juan Monroy

Last fall, I was itching to watch the Ken Burns–produced, seven-part series The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. Alas, last fall was a distracting time, and I never got around to watching the series while it aired on the local PBS station or during the short, seven-day window it was available via the PBS mobile apps.

Now that it is streaming on Amazon Prime, there has been some measure of cognitive dissonance watching the fifth and sixth episodes of The Roosevelts and the recent Amazon-original adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle.

In the documentary, the Allied Powers undertook a number of offensive attacks against the Axis Powers of Germany and Japan while FDR kept the country’s spirits, its military, and its industrial output focused on victory. In the Amazon series, on the other hand, things go much different. It is 1962, and the Axis powers have vanquished the American, British, and Soviet forces to conquer the US into parts of the German Reich and Japanese Empire.

Binge watching can do strange things to the mind.

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