Your Guide To The Eerily Relevant Characters In HBO’s The Plot Against America

Brought together by The Wire creators Ed Burns and David Simon, the Plot Against America cast includes some seriously big names to explore anti-Semitism in a slightly altered version of the United States in the '40s. The HBO series is the latest in a series of alternate history shows on television, following Watchmen, Hunters, and For All Mankind just in the past year. What is with all these "what if" shows these days? Are people unhappy with the state of current events, or something?

The show is based on Philip Roth's 2004 novel, and imagines what the United States would look like if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had not won a third or fourth term and Charles Lindbergh had continued his political career all the way to the White House. Yeah, that Lindbergh; the pilot. He was also a spokesman for a pro-fascist and anti-Semitic activist group in the the '40s. That really happened.

Scary as that is, it's happening in the background of The Plot Against America. The main characters from a lower-middle class Jewish family in New York trying to balance their own American dream with rising discrimination. And these are the actors bringing this family to life on the show.