The miniseries is based on a novel released in 2004 which was written by Philip Roth.
The book sparked the interest of creator David Simon but according to Entertainment Weekly he didn’t feel it was “relevant to our time,” so he initially turned down HBO’s request to adapt the material as a miniseries.
He said: “It was right after Obama had been reelected and I said, ‘I don’t see it.
“Then, [with] what’s happened politically in the last few years — not only in America, but throughout the West — in terms of this dissonance, almost fact-based political realities and demagoguery in the rise of the angry nationalists and populists, the very guts of what Roth was writing about suddenly seemed conceivable.”
