On Wednesday, HBO announced that Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’s next project will be Confederate, a show that will explore an alternate history of the United States wherein the Southern states won the first civil war and "successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution."
The announcement sent shockwaves through social media and the TV world, and the reactions were mostly negative. On Thursday, the four producers involved in the show—Benioff, Weiss, Michael Spellman, and Nichelle Spellman—spoke out for the first time about the controversy in an exclusive interview for Vulture.
give me the confidence of white showrunners telling hbo they wanna write slavery fanfic
The interview—which Vulture made sure to point out was granted by HBO with only 30 minutes notice—served as a way for the Game of Thrones showrunners to explain their vision for the show. But it also gave Michael Spellman (Empire, Foxy Brown) and Nichelle Spellman (Justified, The Good Wife) a voice that was drowned out by Benioff and Weiss’s more famous names and all of the Twitter noise surrounding the original Confederate announcement.
The Spellmans are both black, and although Benioff and Weiss seem to wield more of the power at HBO and have more general name recognition due to the success of Game of Thrones, the Spellmans are just as integral to Confederate as Benioff and Weiss. All four of them will be credited as executive producers and writers for the show. However, the implication is that since only half of the team is black and the white half appears to have more leverage over the press and the network, there is space for a power imbalance. The four tried to put that perception to bed while speaking with Vulture .
"Look…the reality is, Game of Thrones has been a successful show for HBO, which has put us in a position to come and pitch another show and get them excited about it," Benioff said. "That’s what helped get us here. But when we sit down and map out this show, and the season, and the characters, it’ll be the four of us arguing about everything. There is no precedent who gets to rule by decree."
Elsewhere in the interview, Weiss conceded that "slavery is...our original sin" and that "this is a reason to talk about it, not a reason to run from it." The show will, according to the producers, approach the issue in an entirely new way that they hope will spark up new conversations. "Confederate, in all of our minds, will be an alternative-history show," Weiss said. "It’s a science-fiction show. One of the strengths of science fiction is that it can show us how this history is still with us in a way no strictly realistic drama ever could."
But for Michael and Nichelle Spellman, the sting of slavery and the legacy it left behind is something they are forced to deal with everyday. "We are the offspring of this history," Michael says. "As people of color and minorities in general are starting to get a voice, I think there’s a duty to force this discussion."
Many worried that Benioff and Weiss were using the Spellmans and inviting them on board as tokens merely to validate their show idea. Michael claimed that is simply not the case. "Me and Nichelle are not props being used to protect someone else," Michael stated. "We are people who feel a need to address issues the same way they do."
Good luck finding black actors for this project. https://t.co/ruHGTVkesK
One of the more serious concerns of people who were skeptical of the show at first is that, at least on paper, this concept appears to lend well to "slavery porn" or even "wish-fulfilment for white supremacists and the alt-right." Michael Spellman spoke directly to this concern, and his entire answer is worth a read:
"I think that [using the word] "winning" creates the wrong image. [In the world of Confederate], it was a standstill. They maintain their position, the North maintains theirs. What people need to recognize is, and it makes me really want to get into the show: The shit is alive and real today. I think people have got to stop pretending that slavery was something that happened and went away. The shit is affecting people in the present day. And it’s easy for folks to hide from it, because sometimes you’re not able to map it out, especially with how insidious racism has become. But everyone knows that with Trump coming into power, a bunch of shit that had always been there got resurfaced. So the idea that this would be pornography goes back to people imagining whips and plantations. What they need to be imagining is how fucked up things are today, and a story that allows us to now dramatize it in a more tangible matter.”
You can read the full interview over at Vulture.
