The United States is the loser in Amazon’s new series

“It’s potentially very offensive”.

What if the Nazis won the war?

What if Hitler beat the U.S.to the atomic bomb and dropped it on Washington, D.C.?

The Man in the High Castle, based on the acclaimed alternate history novel by science-fiction great Philip K. Dick, will be available for streaming Friday on Amazon Prime Instant Video.

But the show is just as much about character-building as it is world-building. It has the entire duration of a series to do so. In the “High Castle” scenario, Germany and Japan are engaged in a high-level Cold War, and these men make the stakes wrapped up in that unsteady alliance come alive. The pilot felt a bit stagey, but packed in enough of the insane world to feel like a promising prospect.

“The only bittersweet thing is that we were doing Man In The High Castle literally at the same time as The X-Files, because [otherwise] I would have loved to have been part of it”, he says. What can you do? “I was in constant contact with the fans online”.

Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos) dreams of a better life outside Japanese-controlled San Francisco.

Juliana becomes radicalized when she watches a portion of a newsreel, which depicts America and its allies as the winners of the war.

However, so far, “The Man in the High Castle” doesn’t really measure up to “House of Cards” or “Orange is the New Black”. Namely, the introduction of a couple of sympathetic American Nazis.

That sleek and sexy look of the ’60s that Mad Men glamorized? Still that stylish…just with Nazis. Spotnitz first boarded the project in 2012, when it was a miniseries at Syfy.

Excessive cost overshadowed an intriguing premise. Now it’s a period piece, but that somehow makes it even more evocative.

My approach, always, to these things is I find great people that I know have the same sensibility, and understand and respect the work.

Over time, Joe and Juliana have more shared experiences, says Davalos.

“I do think the fact that this is streaming, and that people can watch it in one day, that does affect the way you think about telling a story”. It amplifies the series’ resonance.

“We were filming in the same town, sometimes only a block away”, says Evans. “It wasn’t about what the film actually was, and what it instilled in her-the possibility that the world could be a different place”.

Much of Dick’s best known work explores questions about personal identity and the fragile nature of reality.

“We are deferential to the Japanese”, Qualls said. “You have to be careful and honest and not inflame needlessly”. The whole ambush reminded me of (43-year-old spoiler ahead!) Sonny’s death at the toll bridge in The Godfather, with the hail of bullets and the helpless feel of it. Tell me about putting this dramatic, action-filled sequence together. I’m not sure if you knew this, but life under them is grim. “If you don’t do it, you’re not being honest”. We all like to think we’d be in the resistance, and most of us wouldn’t.

During this “insane rollercoaster” of a journey, Juliana meets Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank.) “He’s an adventurous young man under the powers of the Nazis in NY City”. A very friendly, very all-American Midwestern cop stops to help Joe change the tire, when Joe notices what appears to be ash falling from the sky. The hospitals also burn the bodies of all the “cripples, terminally ill, drag-on-the-state” people. I think [original novelist] Phillip K Dick was a massive draw… And perhaps not surprisingly, Kleintank hints that we’ll see Luke wrestle with the possibility of changing sides, as he learns more about the Nazis and the world he grew up in. But it’s necessary to illuminate how harrowing the circumstances are-and how quickly a culture can normalize itself to such things. But for all that, Spotnitz seems most concerned with retraining viewers to recognize humanity, even that of fascists. I gobbled them up in one sitting and was ready for more, especially after dots start to get connected in episode six. “[And] the subject matter is unsafe, you can really offend people“. “They’re the bad guys”. The Nazi Third Reich and the Japanese empire have split control of the US, and a mysterious news reel shows the reality of the Allies winning the war. “But it’s not a narrative for a television series”, Spotnitz says. “If they’re trying to appeal to a big audience, that’s just the way it goes”.

I will say, too, I’ve seen people respond to the show on the right wing and on the left wing. Such is the spell that “The Man in the High Castle” weaves that, frankly, those are merely the sixth or seventh most-captivating elements of this crackling series.

“It’s such a fine line with history going one way or the other”, Evans says. We hear about it all the time. “It’s an excuse for a plot, but it’s really about who we are”.

We even have a new vocabulary for watching television now.

“My understanding of what I was writing was very superficial and I didn’t really feel like I was making the difference that I had set out to make”, he said. Elvis Presley wouldn’t exist.