The 2015 premiere of The Man in the High Castle on Prime Video marked the first time the young streaming service had produced an original sci-fi series, setting the stage for bigger hits like Fallout and The Boys. More than a decade later, the alt-history series set in a world where the Axis powers won World War II is available to stream on Netflix for the first time, opening it up to a massive new audience.
If you’re thinking about watching The Man in the High Castle you absolutely should, but there’s a catch. While the series ran for four seasons, do yourself a favor and stop watching after season 2, when the show’s sci-fi elements started to get in the way of the rich character stories.
Series creator and season 1 showrunner Frank Spotnitz does a phenomenal job introducing the world of The Man in the High Castle with a Games of Thrones-style opening sequence. Set to a creepy version of The Sound of Music song “Edelweiss,” it shows a map of the United States carved into the Greater Nazi Reich and the Japanese Pacific States, with a Neutral Zone in between that hugs the Rocky Mountain range. The show’s first scene is a propaganda short playing in a U.S. theater. Its images of a bald eagle, happy suburban families, and the space program wouldn’t feel out of place in the real 1962. But when the American flag unfurls, there’s a swastika on it.
Philip K. Dick’s 1962 book The Man in the High Castle was entirely focused on an alt-history San Francisco, but the show’s best innovation is to also spend plenty of time in the Reich. The Man in the High Castle feels disturbingly prescient at a time when the president of the United States has dined with white supremacists, government social media accounts are sharing Nazi slogans, and Young Republican leaders are declaring their love for Hitler. It’s a show about how easy it is to accept the status quo if it benefits you personally, and what it takes to snap people out of their complacency.
By season 1, Japan and Germany have settled into an uneasy Cold War in an echo of how the U.S. and the Soviet Union went from World War II allies to fierce rivals. Germany won WWII by nuking Washington, D.C., and Japan is still trying to get nuclear weapons for themselves.
The alt-history geopolitical tinderbox is compelling enough, but then things get weird. Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos) seems to be enjoying her life in Japan-occupied San Francisco when she’s given a mysterious package by her sister, who is immediately killed by Japanese authorities. The package turns out to be a newsreel that shows footage of the Allies celebrating their victory in World War II.
That impossible film and her sister’s death immediately radicalizes Juliana, setting her on a quest to help the resistance get the footage to a mysterious figure known as the Man in the High Castle (Stephen Root). The film represents a world where the Nazis can be defeated, and the Reich is understandably very motivated to stop any more people from seeing it. Juliana’s reckless pursuit of her new goals also has dire consequences for her boyfriend, Frank Frink (Rupert Evans), a factory worker and aspiring artist. His tragic story is a testament to how badly fascist attempts to crack down on dissent can backfire.
There’s a lot of very heavy and moving material in The Man in the High Castle – a secret Jewish community’s use of the Mourner’s Kaddish as an act of both grief and resistance is one of the most powerful moments in the show — but the series doesn’t wallow in dystopian torture porn as much as The Handmaid’s Tale. The show is at times very funny, particularly with scenes involving the snobby antique store owner Robert Childan (Brennan Brown), who is himself radicalized once he realizes the Japanese will always see him as inferior.
But the best story arc belongs to the show’s wholly original character, Obergruppenführer John Smith (Rufus Sewell). Smith lives the American dream with his beautiful family on Long Island, largely indifferent to the fact that their home was once occupied by Jews the Nazis murdered. He’s mostly concerned with Nazi intrigue and politics, until he discovers his son, a proud member of the Hitler Youth, has muscular dystrophy – a death sentence because of the Reich’s views on disability. That plot reaches a beautiful conclusion in the season 2 finale, and the show never achieves that emotional height again.
The Man in the High Castle had a different showrunner for each of its four seasons. Erik Oleson, who went on to helm Prime Video’s Carnival Row and the final season of Netflix’s Daredevil, skillfully took the reins in season 2. But there’s a steep drop off in quality in season 3, when Treme co-creator Eric Overmyer took over. The show still has some strong moments, particularly involving the story of Frank and his co-worker/friend Ed McCarthy (DJ Qualls), but the plot shifts too far from human-driven stories into the workings of the multiverse. It also unnecessarily ups the already high stakes with a Nazi scheme to invade other realities.
If you’re a completionist, you can watch all of The Man in the High Castle, but for the best experience you can just enjoy the first two seasons. And if you’re still left craving more alt-history stories of Nazis in America, go watch David Simon’s prescient alt-history miniseries The Plot Against America on HBO Max.
The Man in the High Castle is streaming now on Netflix, Prime Video, and MGM Plus.
