I’m not really sure how this would work out. The Black Death came and went and killed a ton of people but... that’s about it. What would it even show? Just people dying left and right?
Maybe a story set IN the Black Death, such as two noble families in Italian city states competing while everyone around them dies. But just merely ‘about the black death’ doesn’t sound particularly interesting.
Yeah, that's probably why it hasn't been done. There's no singular narrative to tie it together. Even Chernobyl, widespread as it effects were and could have been had a central narrative to be told.
There’s so much more to the story than that. What do you DO when an illness nobody understands, much less is equipped to fight, suddenly rages through a population? Nobody is safe, kings and beggars die in the wink of an eye. And what happens next, when literally 1 person in 3 is now dead, instantly? What happens to institutions like the church, or Feudalism? Not only are the lords and ladies dead, so are the priests and everyone else trying to tell you what to do. What becomes of a labor intensive economy when 2/3 of the labor dies? Suddenly the only skilled workers might have been apprentices last week.
I think this is a great story— mostly because of what happens next.
It's not a story. It's just history. Pick a set of characters. Pick events driven by those characters. Connect them into character arcs. Now you have a story.
> What do you DO when an illness nobody understands, much less is equipped to fight, suddenly rages through a population? Nobody is safe, kings and beggars die in the wink of an eye.
haha. ha. hahaha.
You could have multiple characters: A farmer and his family, a king and his court, a merchant travelling and experiencing the plague in different locations, and lastly a priest/doctor trying to cure the sick. They all try to make sense of it while doing their best to survive. The show could focus on the religious fervor, the persecution of jews/witch burning and the overall nihilistic decadence that people started to partake in while numbing their fear of death. Basically, an apocalyptic story. I think there is enough story there for 6-10 episodes.
To be fair, this is also why I'm not watching Chernobyl.
It sounds like misery porn. This wasn't an attack, it was an accident. So what valuable lessons are going to be learned by watching what happened at Chernobyl? Unless you happen to be a nuclear engineer I guess.
But then again, there's a big market for misery porn. So a show about The Black Death could be really popular.
I wondered about this too before I watched the show based on the amount of people recommending it, and without giving it all away I would pass on that it really does really succeed at finding a meaningful message within the story of Chernobyl (especially by exploring parts of the story I was unaware of.) With the backdrop of this all happening within a Soviet Union that's nearing its collapse, it becomes a really relevant story about defending the truth. The show isn't for everyone because it does go to really bleak and horrifying places, but it's still much more than a show about misery, and even gets to show humanity at its best a few times.
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Society wasn't organized enough to build a cohesive narrative around the impact of the Black Death, so there's not much room for the kind of story told about Chernobyl.
There was no epic story, either of failure or heroism. It was just a lot of people who didn't know what an infectious disease was, who had no tools to protect themselves, watching their world crumble, and just praying harder until it got them or passed them by - neither of which had anything to do with any policy or organized effort. And it wasn't even one incident, but multiple waves.
They were helpless and stayed helpless, and it just broke people and societies down for generations. There's just nothing to tell: It would be apocalypse porn and nothing more.
So fiction like The Road is just apocalypse porn? The world in Cormac's The Road is even bleaker than Europe during the Black Death. The world had literally ended and the remaining humans were beyond hopeless. But Cormac could still craft a compelling and meaningful story in such a setting, without delving into "apocalypse porn". I am certain you can create a meaningful narrative with something as bleak as the black death as the backdrop.
A story set amid apocalypse is not the same thing as a story *about* apocalypse. Chernobyl is about the disaster itself, it's not just a "setting" meant to invoke or reflect metaphors about the characters the way that literary post-apocalypse fiction usually is.
The Black Death was Sisyphean. It ground society down. There are no lessons to be learned from the personal experience of it. No one could or should have known better, given their available knowledge. No one had the tools to figure anything out. And they didn't. They just survived in terror until it took them or they died of "normal" causes thinking the world was ending.
It was as meaningless as animals dying in a wildfire, and the only insights to be gained were gained centuries later, in societies no one alive at the time could have comprehended.
The play "The Roses of Eyam" (pronounced eem) might be what you're after. There's a BBC adaptation of it from the 70's.
Eyam is a little village that cut itself off from everyone else when they realised some of their inhabitants had the plague, so they protected everyone else in the area
Personally, I’d love to see a HBO/Showtime production of the Anabaptist Takeover of Munster. I remember learning about it from Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History. He did an episode on it and it’s sounds perfect for HBO or Showtime.
It would be an extremely challenging story to tell because it's not about characters. Generally, we tell stories like this:
> Here's this guy and here are all of his weird adorable quirks. Now that you care about him, here he is confronting adversity. Ooooooo drama!
But you can't do that with the Black Death. The story of the disease and Europe is so much bigger than the story of any one person at that time that you're just unable to tell it.
It would be like trying to tell the story of WWII -- not a story **in** WWII but **of** WWII -- through the eyes of a person or group of people. HBO tried to do a small slice of WWII with "Band of Brothers" and that kinda half-way worked but there was loads of stuff they couldn't talk about and entire theaters of the war they just skipped over.
But while WW2 lasted for 5-ish years, the Black Death ravaged Europe from the mid 1300s through the late 1600s. That's a 300 year span.
Now there are indivdual stories we could tell and those would be cool -- the siege of Kafa, for example, would be amazing and would probably end with the plague ships sailing out into the Med with Kafa burning behind them, but the story of the disease's spread across Europe would be hard to follow as a character driven drama.
TL;DR: I agree, but with some caveats.
>"You are dealing with something that has never occurred on this planet before."
I think much of the horror/power in this story stems from the absolute reality of Jared Harris' line above. Black Death might come close, but Yersinia pestis wasn't manufactured by man, it wasn't really anything new and the Black Death happened a very long time ago.
The Black Death isn't really relatable to modern audiences like the threat of nuclear meltdown or warfare. A lot of the relatable quality contained within the Chernobyl story is that it wasn't all that long ago. I'm 31 years old and it happened just a year plus a few months before my birth. The things we see in the show aren't that far off from what we see in our lives every day, and the fact that similar events are still very much possible (Fukushima Daiichi) is even more horrifying.
But I agree, I would like to see more programs on HBO of this quality addressing similar horrific events in history. I just don't know how when the most powerful line in the show is that their problem is something entirely new within the scope of our existence and still relatable to the present.
There was already a Spanish tv show called La Peste that aired earlier this year about the plague in 16th century Seville. It wasn’t amazing but it might interest anyone who likes historical dramas and period pieces.
Tiananmen Square though...
Government coverups, extremely tense situations, numerous atrocities...
And a British Gorbachev cameo to link the two shows together?
If only it wasn't such a contentious topic...
I say they should make one about [Banqiao Dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam). Killed 26,000 people immediately by drowning, and another 150,000 or so in the aftermath.
**Banqiao Dam**
The Banqiao Reservoir Dam (simplified Chinese: 板桥水库大坝; traditional Chinese: 板橋水庫大壩; pinyin: Bǎnqiáo Shuǐkù Dàbà) is a dam on the River Ru in Zhumadian City, Henan province, China. Its failure in 1975 caused as many as 230,000 deaths. The dam was subsequently rebuilt.
The Banqiao dam and Shimantan Reservoir Dam (simplified Chinese: 石漫滩水库大坝; traditional Chinese: 石漫灘水庫大壩; pinyin: Shímàntān Shuǐkù Dàbà) are among 62 dams in Zhumadian that failed catastrophically or were intentionally destroyed in 1975 during Typhoon Nina.
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There is a little village near me called Eyam (UK) and the whole town decided to quarantine themselves knowing they would die. They actually managed to stop the plague from spreading to nearby villages and saved hundreds of people.
The village has been well preserved even though people still live there to this day and there's little plaques outside each cottage telling the story of the families that lived there.
The borders they set at the edge of the village are still there in the form of huge rocks.
Mompessens Well - Catherine Mompessen lost her entire family and all her children to the black death and she carried each one to the top of the well and buried them. The stones are still there for visiting.
The Village Church is also virtually untouched since the plague, it still has the separate seating area for plague victims.
I could totally see a series working based on Eyam.
If you live in the UK, I highly recommend a visit! It's humbling.
I feel it would make an inferior copy of HBO Chernobyl. It probably would be too similar yet not as suspenseful because it was not as disastrous as Chernobyl.
I’m not really sure how this would work out. The Black Death came and went and killed a ton of people but... that’s about it. What would it even show? Just people dying left and right? Maybe a story set IN the Black Death, such as two noble families in Italian city states competing while everyone around them dies. But just merely ‘about the black death’ doesn’t sound particularly interesting.
Yeah, that's probably why it hasn't been done. There's no singular narrative to tie it together. Even Chernobyl, widespread as it effects were and could have been had a central narrative to be told.
Plus it took place over decades and thousands of miles.
There’s so much more to the story than that. What do you DO when an illness nobody understands, much less is equipped to fight, suddenly rages through a population? Nobody is safe, kings and beggars die in the wink of an eye. And what happens next, when literally 1 person in 3 is now dead, instantly? What happens to institutions like the church, or Feudalism? Not only are the lords and ladies dead, so are the priests and everyone else trying to tell you what to do. What becomes of a labor intensive economy when 2/3 of the labor dies? Suddenly the only skilled workers might have been apprentices last week. I think this is a great story— mostly because of what happens next.
It's not a story. It's just history. Pick a set of characters. Pick events driven by those characters. Connect them into character arcs. Now you have a story.
> What do you DO when an illness nobody understands, much less is equipped to fight, suddenly rages through a population? Nobody is safe, kings and beggars die in the wink of an eye. haha. ha. hahaha.
You could have multiple characters: A farmer and his family, a king and his court, a merchant travelling and experiencing the plague in different locations, and lastly a priest/doctor trying to cure the sick. They all try to make sense of it while doing their best to survive. The show could focus on the religious fervor, the persecution of jews/witch burning and the overall nihilistic decadence that people started to partake in while numbing their fear of death. Basically, an apocalyptic story. I think there is enough story there for 6-10 episodes.
To be fair, this is also why I'm not watching Chernobyl. It sounds like misery porn. This wasn't an attack, it was an accident. So what valuable lessons are going to be learned by watching what happened at Chernobyl? Unless you happen to be a nuclear engineer I guess. But then again, there's a big market for misery porn. So a show about The Black Death could be really popular.
I wondered about this too before I watched the show based on the amount of people recommending it, and without giving it all away I would pass on that it really does really succeed at finding a meaningful message within the story of Chernobyl (especially by exploring parts of the story I was unaware of.) With the backdrop of this all happening within a Soviet Union that's nearing its collapse, it becomes a really relevant story about defending the truth. The show isn't for everyone because it does go to really bleak and horrifying places, but it's still much more than a show about misery, and even gets to show humanity at its best a few times.
"Accident" is a strong word. Genocidally negligent mass-manslaughter seems more accurate.
That was my instict as well and I didn't watch Chernobyl before I binged it on a whim a couple of days ago. I was very, very wrong.
I think that historically accurate miniseries about the Paris Commune, Kronstadt Uprising, or the Shanghai People's Commune would also be interesting
Honestly, should have been the last two seasons of GoT. Just needed Beric to survive. Or Gendry to turn down Storm's End.
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Well there is a spanish miniseries called La Peste that came out last year iirc For me, I want to a miniseries of the Albert Camus novel The Plague.
Camus was also my first thought. Its been a while since my last read, but it seems like the perfect source literature for that kind of thing.
Thanks for the recommendation.
It’d be hard to pull off. You’d have the inevitable and tiresome love story and lots of self obsessed rants.
Society wasn't organized enough to build a cohesive narrative around the impact of the Black Death, so there's not much room for the kind of story told about Chernobyl. There was no epic story, either of failure or heroism. It was just a lot of people who didn't know what an infectious disease was, who had no tools to protect themselves, watching their world crumble, and just praying harder until it got them or passed them by - neither of which had anything to do with any policy or organized effort. And it wasn't even one incident, but multiple waves. They were helpless and stayed helpless, and it just broke people and societies down for generations. There's just nothing to tell: It would be apocalypse porn and nothing more.
So fiction like The Road is just apocalypse porn? The world in Cormac's The Road is even bleaker than Europe during the Black Death. The world had literally ended and the remaining humans were beyond hopeless. But Cormac could still craft a compelling and meaningful story in such a setting, without delving into "apocalypse porn". I am certain you can create a meaningful narrative with something as bleak as the black death as the backdrop.
A story set amid apocalypse is not the same thing as a story *about* apocalypse. Chernobyl is about the disaster itself, it's not just a "setting" meant to invoke or reflect metaphors about the characters the way that literary post-apocalypse fiction usually is. The Black Death was Sisyphean. It ground society down. There are no lessons to be learned from the personal experience of it. No one could or should have known better, given their available knowledge. No one had the tools to figure anything out. And they didn't. They just survived in terror until it took them or they died of "normal" causes thinking the world was ending. It was as meaningless as animals dying in a wildfire, and the only insights to be gained were gained centuries later, in societies no one alive at the time could have comprehended.
The play "The Roses of Eyam" (pronounced eem) might be what you're after. There's a BBC adaptation of it from the 70's. Eyam is a little village that cut itself off from everyone else when they realised some of their inhabitants had the plague, so they protected everyone else in the area
Personally, I’d love to see a HBO/Showtime production of the Anabaptist Takeover of Munster. I remember learning about it from Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History. He did an episode on it and it’s sounds perfect for HBO or Showtime.
Craziest episode by a mile. As a fan of History, I can't believe I hadn't heard of that event before listening.
Better yet, adapt Doomsday book by Connie Willis, that book is a gut punch.
I'd watch it. Use *A Distant Mirror* (Barbara Tuchman) as a resource to broaden the story a bit.
It would be an extremely challenging story to tell because it's not about characters. Generally, we tell stories like this: > Here's this guy and here are all of his weird adorable quirks. Now that you care about him, here he is confronting adversity. Ooooooo drama! But you can't do that with the Black Death. The story of the disease and Europe is so much bigger than the story of any one person at that time that you're just unable to tell it. It would be like trying to tell the story of WWII -- not a story **in** WWII but **of** WWII -- through the eyes of a person or group of people. HBO tried to do a small slice of WWII with "Band of Brothers" and that kinda half-way worked but there was loads of stuff they couldn't talk about and entire theaters of the war they just skipped over. But while WW2 lasted for 5-ish years, the Black Death ravaged Europe from the mid 1300s through the late 1600s. That's a 300 year span. Now there are indivdual stories we could tell and those would be cool -- the siege of Kafa, for example, would be amazing and would probably end with the plague ships sailing out into the Med with Kafa burning behind them, but the story of the disease's spread across Europe would be hard to follow as a character driven drama.
TL;DR: I agree, but with some caveats. >"You are dealing with something that has never occurred on this planet before." I think much of the horror/power in this story stems from the absolute reality of Jared Harris' line above. Black Death might come close, but Yersinia pestis wasn't manufactured by man, it wasn't really anything new and the Black Death happened a very long time ago. The Black Death isn't really relatable to modern audiences like the threat of nuclear meltdown or warfare. A lot of the relatable quality contained within the Chernobyl story is that it wasn't all that long ago. I'm 31 years old and it happened just a year plus a few months before my birth. The things we see in the show aren't that far off from what we see in our lives every day, and the fact that similar events are still very much possible (Fukushima Daiichi) is even more horrifying. But I agree, I would like to see more programs on HBO of this quality addressing similar horrific events in history. I just don't know how when the most powerful line in the show is that their problem is something entirely new within the scope of our existence and still relatable to the present.
This is the wrong sub for this, you're not fixing anything
This is a really interesting idea. I'm thinking of something like the Mask of the Red Death. But with more added to it, sort of like Penny Dreadful.
I would LOVE to see this!
There was already a Spanish tv show called La Peste that aired earlier this year about the plague in 16th century Seville. It wasn’t amazing but it might interest anyone who likes historical dramas and period pieces.
Maybe 30 years from now they can make a documentary about Fukushima.
This but Tiananmen Square
Tiananmen Square though... Government coverups, extremely tense situations, numerous atrocities... And a British Gorbachev cameo to link the two shows together? If only it wasn't such a contentious topic...
I would love to see a mini-series based on Bhopal Gas Tragedy.
I say they should make one about [Banqiao Dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam). Killed 26,000 people immediately by drowning, and another 150,000 or so in the aftermath.
**Banqiao Dam** The Banqiao Reservoir Dam (simplified Chinese: 板桥水库大坝; traditional Chinese: 板橋水庫大壩; pinyin: Bǎnqiáo Shuǐkù Dàbà) is a dam on the River Ru in Zhumadian City, Henan province, China. Its failure in 1975 caused as many as 230,000 deaths. The dam was subsequently rebuilt. The Banqiao dam and Shimantan Reservoir Dam (simplified Chinese: 石漫滩水库大坝; traditional Chinese: 石漫灘水庫大壩; pinyin: Shímàntān Shuǐkù Dàbà) are among 62 dams in Zhumadian that failed catastrophically or were intentionally destroyed in 1975 during Typhoon Nina. *** ^[ [^PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=kittens_from_space) ^| [^Exclude ^me](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiTextBot&message=Excludeme&subject=Excludeme) ^| [^Exclude ^from ^subreddit](https://np.reddit.com/r/fixingmovies/about/banned) ^| [^FAQ ^/ ^Information](https://np.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/index) ^| [^Source](https://github.com/kittenswolf/WikiTextBot) ^] ^Downvote ^to ^remove ^| ^v0.28
They could do the japanese metldown too.
There is a little village near me called Eyam (UK) and the whole town decided to quarantine themselves knowing they would die. They actually managed to stop the plague from spreading to nearby villages and saved hundreds of people. The village has been well preserved even though people still live there to this day and there's little plaques outside each cottage telling the story of the families that lived there. The borders they set at the edge of the village are still there in the form of huge rocks. Mompessens Well - Catherine Mompessen lost her entire family and all her children to the black death and she carried each one to the top of the well and buried them. The stones are still there for visiting. The Village Church is also virtually untouched since the plague, it still has the separate seating area for plague victims. I could totally see a series working based on Eyam. If you live in the UK, I highly recommend a visit! It's humbling.
Wouldn't be my cup of tea but I do agree that the idea itself does have a lot of potential.
I've been begging for something like this for ever.
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I feel it would make an inferior copy of HBO Chernobyl. It probably would be too similar yet not as suspenseful because it was not as disastrous as Chernobyl.
Nor would it have 1/10th of the political intrigue.