Sideways televised: Towards a history of televised alternate histories

Abstract

Alternate histories have been a part of the television landscape in the United States since a 1963 episode of The Twilight Zone (1959–64) explored the multiple worlds theory. As an interdisciplinary subgenre of science fiction, historical fiction and often even contemporary sitcoms and dramas, alternate histories have only grown more fiscally successful and generically mature as television, itself, has matured and grown as a medium. The development of the television alternate history genre in the past decade parallels the growth of the literary genre in the 1990s, which was accompanied by awards, the normalization of the genre, and a small yet robust canon of scholarship. As such, this article on alternate histories relies heavily on the literary theory that came before it in (1) defining the televisual alternate history genre, (2) outlining the genre’s unique purposes and (3) historicizing the four subgenres of televised alternate histories: time travel narratives, parallel world theories, pure alternate histories, and fantastical narratives. A long-overlooked genre, alternate histories have important implications for ideological awareness of the past and the present.