Confederate, which is being developed by the showrunners behind Game of Thrones, got beat up in a hashtag campaign after it was announced last year. But TV Line reports HBO is still developing it:

At the Television Critics Assoc.’s summer press tour on Wednesday, HBO president Casey Bloys told TVLine that the controversial drama project from Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss remains in development — despite the duo’s recently-inked deal with Disney and Lucasfilm to create a new Star Wars trilogy.

“There’s no change,” Bloys maintained. “They haven’t written anything. [David and D.B] still have to finish digital effects work on [Game of Thrones‘ final season]… and they obviously now have the Star Wars movie. But at a certain point they’ll tell us when they are ready.”

This sounds like an idea inspired by Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, which is also currently a TV show. High Castle is a show about a world in which the Nazis won WWII. The concept behind Confederate is that instead of the Union winning the Civil War, the south seceded and modern-day slavery is still legal. Here’s how HBO initially announced it last July.

Confederate chronicles the events leading to the Third American Civil War. The series takes place in an alternate timeline, where the southern states have successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution. The story follows a broad swath of characters on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone – freedom fighters, slave hunters, politicians, abolitionists, journalists, the executives of a slave-holding conglomerate and the families of people in their thrall.

There’s no doubt that the point of this show is to be the Handmaid’s Tale for black people, i.e. something presented as science fiction which is really just a jumping off point for a thousand terrible think-pieces at Salon and Slate. But in this case, the writers launched the think pieces as soon as the show was announced and the conclusion was that the show was a bad idea. From Gizmodo:

What is there to be learned from seeing black people being enslaved, brutalized, and exploited that we can not already glean from our actual historical record? What is there to be learned about being born into a system in which you are at an immediate social disadvantage that we can’t already cull from decades’-worth of statistical analyses of black peoples’ economic lives? Though black people are now free in America, in very profound and devastating ways, we are still dealing with the fallout of enslavement that manifests itself in a variety of forms systemic inequality. These aren’t the trappings of an alt-history prestige drama. They are our realities.

HBO apologized for how the show was announced saying it should have been more sensitive given the nature of the material. But within a few days, a hashtag campaign was launched to kill the show.

The creators of #GameOfThrones are facing a tweet storm over HBO's next project, #Confederate. https://t.co/MYvot58YTU pic.twitter.com/TfxcvhqVV7

— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) July 31, 2017

My take on this hasn’t changed from a year ago. It would take months of work and millions of dollars to get this off the ground and meanwhile every casting choice and decision would be scrutinized, criticized, and brutalized on social media. It would be death by 1,000 cuts, and not from people on the right but people on the left.

There’s only one way to make this happen at this point. HBO would need to offer the leader of last year’s hashtag campaign a sweet consulting gig. And maybe hire Ta-Nehisi Coates too. Because unless you convince people this isn’t going to be slavery fanfic, people are going to keep pounding it.

The irony is that the arguments against this show would also work against the Handmaid’s Tale too. What is there to be learned from seeing women enslaved, brutalized, and exploited that we can not already glean from our actual historical record? We really don’t need Handmaid’s Tale to make the points that show makes, but obviously, that doesn’t stop progressives from loving that show to death.