Amazon and Will Packer are developing an alternative history series called “Black America.”
“Black America” will imagine the world where Black people rule a number of southern states ahead of an epic clash with the United States.
This week, Deadline exclusively reported:
Another alternate history drama series, which has been in the works at Amazon for over a year, also paints a reality where southern states have left the Union but takes a very different approach.
Titled “Black America,” the drama hails from top feature producer Will Packer (“Ride Along,” “Think Like A Man” franchises, “Straight Outta Compton”) and Peabody-winning “The Boondocks” creator and “Black Jesus” co-creator Aaron McGruder. It envisions an alternate history where newly freed African Americans have secured the Southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama post-Reconstruction as reparations for slavery, and with that land, the freedom to shape their own destiny.
The sovereign nation they formed, New Colonia, has had a tumultuous and sometimes violent relationship with its looming “Big Neighbor,” both ally and foe, the United States.
The past 150 years have been witness to military incursions, assassinations, regime change, coups, etc. Today, after two decades of peace with the U.S. and unprecedented growth, an ascendant New Colonia joins the ranks of major industrialized nations on the world stage as America slides into rapid decline.
Inexorably tied together, the fate of two nations, indivisible, hangs in the balance.
Deadline initially announced news of the Amazon project at the beginning of the year but the producers hadn’t revealed details about the series except that it would take place in an alternate universe in the vein of “The Man in the High Castle,” another Amazon series, which takes a look at what the world might be like had World War II turned out differently.
HBO’s highly publicized announcement of “Confederate,” from the Game of Thrones creators, is what prompted the producers behind “Black America” to unveil the show’s premise. “It felt this was the appropriate time to make sure that audiences and the creative community knew that there was a project that preexisted, and we are pretty far down the road with it,” Packer told Deadline.
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