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HBO Is Sorry for Telling You About Confederate That Way

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Photo: Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

If you’ve heard of HBO’s upcoming series Confederate, you’ve possibly gotten upset about Confederate. What the network now wants you to know is, the show is actually a lot more nuanced than the first, clumsily released press release let on. Though everything in that memo was true — the show from Game of Thrones’ David Benioff and D.B. Weiss will indeed imagine life after a third Civil War where the South successfully succeeded and is still slave-owning — HBO CEO Richard Plepler apologized for the way it was announced. (The news of Confederate spawned the #NoConfederate movement from April Reign, the activist behind #OscarsSoWhite.) “We screwed up in an important way,†Plepler said Tuesday at the Vanity Fair summit, according to Deadline. Confederate, he said, will be about “showing what we call the thin line, the thin veneer of civilization — that’s what we were meant to explore. Where we screwed up was we tried to explain a complicated subject in a press release in three paragraphs.†Confederate is still a go, but next time the rollout will be more thought-out. “A lie goes halfway around the world before the truth puts its boots on,†Plepler said, “and we bear some of the responsibility for that.â€

HBO Is Sorry for Telling You About Confederate That Way