Alternate History / Live-Action TV

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• Implied in 30 Rock. Events mirror the real world pretty closely (i.e. the Clinton, Bush and Obama presidencies), but there are some key differences, and the point of divergence appears to be around World War I. For instance, although the Austro-Hungarian Empire still fell, the Hapsburgs are apparently still in power as monarchs of both Austria and parts of what is modern Germany in our world, Transylvania is an independent country rather than part of a united Romania, and Kristin Chenoweth was murdered in Yemen.
• Aside from the whole "aliens crashlanding on Earth" part of the story, apparently Puerto Rico is a US state and the ERA passed in Alien Nation.
• American Horror Story: 1984 veers into this in the back half, as Richard Ramirez escapes prison, slaughters the members of Kajagoogoo at Camp Redwood, and is then sentenced to a Fate Worse than Death by the ghosts of the camp (killing him every time his Resurrective Immortality kicks in), something which continues until the present day. In reality, obviously, none of this ever happened with Ramirez staying in prison until his death from lymphoma in 2013, and Kajagoogoo all still being alive as of 2019.
• The Boys (2019): In the show's universe, superheroes have been around at least since the '60s. You wouldn't be able to tell from the way society is more or less the same compared to our world. This gets called into question as of episode 6: The Boys discover from their encounter with the Super baby the previous episode that Vought has been creating Super since 1971 using their charities as cover. This is the same episode where Stillwell outright admits that the entire "superhero mythology" of the Boys-verse was manufactured for public consumption.
• Bridgerton:
  • The series takes place in an alternate and fictional timeline of the Regency time period. In the real-life historical setting of 1813, racism and slavery were still active. However, in this fictional setting, people of all colors are seen as equals. This is due to King George III marrying a Black woman, Queen Charlotte. Thus, people of all colors were allowed to enter aristocratic society, achieve high rankings, and become equals. In fact, racism doesn't even appear to exist in the show's setting; with the only mention of it being by Lady Danbury. She recalls how society was once "divided by color" before the king and queen's marriage ended such thinking and changed history. Queen Charlotte, who in real life was incorrectly speculated to have African ancestry, is portrayed by a Black actress, which allowed more of Britain's Black population to rise in high society like she has.
  • The prequel series Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story goes into more detail on what is called "The Great Experiment", which led to black people being integrated into British society.
• Casey Jones: While it still deals with the famous railroad engineer, it takes place in an entirely different history in the years before his famous railroad accident claimed his life. Here, Casey is working as a full-fledged engineer on the Midwest and Central Railroad in the early 1880s, having ascended to the position much earlier than he did in real life, and on an entirely different railroad no less. That being said, historical events did play out more or less the same, as the second episode specifically deals with the assassination of James A. Garfield and the quick ascendancy of Chester A. Arthur to the position.
• Cavemen: Cavemen have survived into the present day and exist as a minority group alongside Homo sapiens.
• Class of '07: The series takes place in an alternate 2017 when an Unspecified Apocalypse floods Australia and apparently much of the world.
• Danger 5: World War II in The '60s. The second series has the Cold War in The '80s and includes an Alternate-History Nazi Victory.
• Surprisingly, Doctor Who has only dabbled with this concept a handful of times. The Doctor has meddled (or stopped meddling) in history all throughout the show's run, but he has visited alternate history-tracks only twice, in "Inferno" and "Rise of the Cybermen"/"The Age of Steel", while in "Turn Left" we get the alternate history of "What if the Doctor was not there to defend the Earth?" Needless to say, it was pretty ugly.
  • In "Day of the Daleks", the the Third Doctor visits a future Earth which he then retrospectively turns into an alternate history. To elaborate, just after the Doctor left our time, World War III broke out, weakening Earth and enabling the Daleks to take over. The Doctor learns enough about how the war started to return to our time and prevent it from happening, thus erasing the Dalek-occupied future.
  • In "Pyramids of Mars", Sarah Jane asks why they don't just leave to avoid getting killed since they know the Big Bad didn't destroy earth in the 19th century since she is from 20th century Earth. The Doctor explains that now that they are involved in events alternate histories are inevitable and "her" Earth may never exist if they don't stop the Big Bad. He even takes her to her "present" and shows her a blasted and sterile wasteland that will result if they don't go back and fix things.
  • The series often involves alternate histories in practice, they are just super subtle about it. Over the years, many incompatible histories and futures are shown from adventure to adventure. Former showrunner Steven Moffat has outright said that continuity errors aren't continuity errors, we just haven't seen the episode where the Doctor's traveled back in time to change history.
  • However these become a major plot point in the 8th Doctor's earliest stories in Big Finish Doctor Who. In "Invaders from Mars", there is a different number of U.S states and Orson Welles doesn't recognise Shakespeare. "Time of the Daleks" elaborates on what happened to Shakespeare, and in "Neverland" it is revealed that the Doctor saving Charley Pollard is causing the Universe to be infected by Anti-Time, which is destroying the Web of Time.
  • "Last of the Time Lords" depicts an alternate 2008-2009 where the Master rules over Earth and Martha Jones becomes a legend while Walking the Earth. After the Paradox Machine holding the entire scenario in place is destroyed, time reverts itself back and everything that happened over the year is erased from history.
• For All Mankind is about the Space Race becoming more intense after the Soviet Union manages to land a human on the Moon a month before Apollo 11.
• The Handmaid's Tale: The first episode shows the birth rate had plummeted in 2015 to catastrophic levels. While the US birth rate has fallen, it's still only slightly below replacement levels. (And in the real world, this is more due to societal changes where people choose to have children later, or not at all, rather than having pollution cause an epidemic of miscarriages and stillbirths, although the former was blamed as well.) This explains the "present day" being not far in the future after this. It is later shown that June gave birth to Nichole in 2017, when the TV series began. She also says her previous child Hannah was taken away five years before, setting the coup which led to Gilead in around 2012. It's contradicted however by a Boston Globe headline about the attacks, dated as September 15, 2014, showing these took place shortly before.
• Hollywood is an idealistic fantasy in which a group of 1940s Hollywood players, wannabes and hustlers team up to make a film that ushers in a diverse, homophobia-free Hollywood that frowns upon sexual harassment.
• You have to look carefully, but it's in the background of House of Cards (US). Walker, elected in 2012, replaced a Republican and is the 45th President of the United States. Also, Frank starts the series as Majority Whip of the House of Representatives; since he's a Democrat, this indicates that they didn't lose control in 2010.
• House of Cards (UK) does something similar, with the events of the series kicking off after Margaret Thatcher resigns from office several years before she did in reality.
• In JAG there really was a smoking gun connecting Saddam Hussein to Al-Qaeda, discovered by U.S. troops in one of Saddam's palaces, as seen in "Lawyers, Guns and Money". However this information appears to be classified (for some reason), because a year later Harm, Mac & Bud prepare their defense arguments before the International Criminal Court in "People v. SecNav" and Mac explicitly states that there is no smoking gun connecting Al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein.
• Korean drama The King 2 Hearts takes place in an alternate universe where modern day South Korea is a constitutional monarchy ruled by the descendants of the Joseon dynasty. Presumably the Japanese decided to leave them in place as puppet rulers rather than annex Korea outright.
• The Man in the High Castle is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's seminal alternate history novel in which the Axis won World War II and have taken over the world. The USA is split between the German and Japanese empires, with a neutral zone in the Rocky Mountains separating the two superpowers.
• Motherland: Fort Salem:
  • The series has Salem witches being real, who made a pact with Massachusetts Colony to fight on their behalf in exchange for ending persecution of them. It carried over into the US, until in modern times the Army has witch soldiers fighting the country's battles.
  • Promotional materials seem to suggest that in the Motherland universe, the American Civil War was different or never happened, as Sarah Alder's likeness occupies the universe's equivalent of the Lincoln Memorial. She also seems to have displaced George Washington in the Revolutionary war, as her visage occupies his place on Mount Rushmore, and she is depicted in his place in Emanuel Leutze's "Crossing the Delaware" painting.
  • Fleshed out with a timeline shown on a chalkboard in a classroom during a training exercise, which shows that history radically changed in the 20th century to the point where there was no equivalent to World War II.
• Mrs. Davis: The show is set in 2023, with Mrs. Davis, a high tech Algorithm connected to a large chunk of the population, having been introduced at some point in the preceding decade. As a result of its efforts, war, famine, and unemployment have all been eradicated, while social media such as Facebook and Twitter have become obsolete.
• The Plot Against America: Like the book upon which the miniseries is based, the divergence point is Charles Lindbergh running for president on a platform to keep America out of World War 2 in 1940 and defeating Roosevelt in the election.
• Political Animals: It diverged sometime around the '80s or at least 1992 at the latest. Bud Hammond's presidency seems to have replaced Bill Clinton's, and Hillary Clinton's turn as a Senator from New York seems to have been replaced by Elaine as Governor of Illinois.^note Incidentally, the real HRC is originally from Chicago. Also, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was was replaced by Diane Nash (who is the first openly lesbian Supreme Court Justice).
• Power Rangers:
  • As pointed out in History of Power Rangers the Power Rangers franchise takes place in a universe where the Earth's Moon has a breathable atmosphere and apparently normal Earth gravity. It was also still being visited by astronauts until Rita Repulsa was freed by said astronauts.
  • Additionally, the city of Los Angeles was first settled by the British and is called Angel Grove, and a number of other cities have alternate names, indicating similar alternate histories; most prominently, Boston was named Corinth in Power Rangers RPM.
  • Due to moving New Zealand in 2003, California has appeared to not experience the drought that plagued it in our world. It has also appeared that California's climate has shifted to allow for tropical deciduous forests compared to the shrublands present in the earlier seasons.
• In Quantum Leap, it's not clear from the start, but over time, ignoring both the effects of Sam's leaps and the 20 Minutes into the Future nature of the show's "present", it's soon made clear that the world the show takes place in isn't one-for-one the same as ours. For example, in Season 5 alone, it's not only revealed that Lee Harvey Oswald had killed both JFK and Jackie, but also that Marilyn Monroe committed suicide in 1960.
• In the 2006 BBC adaptation of the short story "Random Quest" by John Wyndham, the Point of Divergence between Colin Trafford's universe and the Alternate Universe to which he is sent was the Berlin Wall never falling because there was no glasnost and perestroika, which implies that Mikhail Gorbachev never became the leader of the Soviet Union. As a result, the Cold War continued to intensify until the United States and the Soviet Union's power dwindled and both were eclipsed by the People's Republic of China. In 2005, Japan discovered significant oil deposits in the South Pacific and its threatening behaviour towards the Philippines and Indonesia over the course of the last 18 months has placed it on the verge of war with the US. The UK is suffering a severe drought with reservoirs throughout Southeast England and Wales being dry for months. This leads to the declaration of a state of emergency. The Western world is experiencing a severe fertility crisis which is expected to worsen over the course of the next ten years. Consequently, the United Nations Security Council has lifted its ban on human cloning and the first viable human clone has been already been born to a couple in San Francisco. In contrast to the 1971 film adaptation Quest for Love, the space programme in the parallel universe is more advanced than in Colin's universe. There has already been a manned mission to Mars. In 2005, in a joint operation between NASA and the Chinese National Space Administration called the Juno mission, an unmanned Jupiter polar explorer was launched from Cape Canaveral. It took fifteen months to reach Jupiter.
• Red Dwarf dabbled in the episode "Tikka To Ride". A malfunctioning time drive has the crew appearing in Dallas in 1963, just as Lee Harvey Oswald was lining up his third shot. Kennedy survives and remains president... until he is impeached for having an affair with Mafia boss Sam Giancana's mistress. J. Edgar Hoover becomes president in '66, following Kennedy's impeachment, but is blackmailed by the Mafia, and unable to prevent the Soviets from installing nuclear missiles in Cuba. With Soviet nukes 200 miles from the US mainland, panic broke out, and most cities were abandoned. In the end, the crew set up a second gunman on the "little hill over there covered in lawn", who turns out to be none other than the Bad Future version of Kennedy himself, ready to commit suicide to save the US and restore his reputation.
• Parodied in the 2012 Royal Canadian Air Farce special in a hilarious case of Russian Reversal. When the Soviets won the 1972 Summit Series against Canada, the Soviets then proceeded to conquer the country and turn it into Soviet Canuckistan for real. Canada now flies the hammer and sickle, eats at Vladimir Hortons (a parody of Tim Hortons), and hockey greats like Paul Henderson were forgotten. Fortunately, Paul Henderson himself wakes up from his nightmare.
• Saturday Night Live parodied this. For some reason all the questions came from a ten-year old kid in New Jersey, starting with, "What if Eleanor Roosevelt could fly?"
  • "What if Spartacus had a Piper Cub?"
  • "What if Napoleon had a fully armed B-52 at the battle of Waterloo?"
  • "What if the Aztecs had had escalators?" (Apparently, it allowed them to fight off Cortez!)
• The TV series Sliders used this as its entire premise. Every episode our heroes slide into a new alternate present.
  • An interesting episode has them slide into a world with technology decades (if not centuries) ahead of normal. This is due to World War II lasting several years longer than in our world, resulting in a different president being elected. So when Roswell That Ends Well came around, he made a decision to go public with the knowledge of aliens instead of covering it up. The resulting technological trade jump-started American progress, allowing for a manned mission to Mars to take place (apparently, the Reticulans were smart enough to not to give a primitive warlike race interstellar travel technology).
• Star Trek:
  • The Mirror Universe repeatedly featured in various Star Trek media is strongly implied to be this, although the specifics of the point(s) of divergence have yet to be touched upon. At the very least, the history of the Terran Empire stretches back before the 20th century, so it would be a case of Alternate History even when it was introduced in Star Trek: The Original Series.
• Stranger Things is a more subtle case than most, but it takes place in one where Project MKUltra actually produced successful results. That would eventually result in the creation of Hawkins National Laboratory for developing Psychic Powers-equipped Super Soldiers the United States would use against the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
• The Supernatural Season 6 episode "My Heart Will Go On" takes place in the present of an alternate history in which the Titanic never sank. The timeline was created by Balthazar saving the ship to provide more souls to fight alongside Castiel, and also to stop Céline Dion's career from taking off.
• The Twilight Zone (1985):
  • In "I of Newton", the demon tells Sam that he can show him Berlin if Nazi Germany had won World War II or a 21st Century Rome if Alexander the Great had lived to a ripe old age.
  • In "Extra Innings", an up-and-coming baseball player named Monte Hanks entered a coma in 1910, two years into his career, after getting hit in the face with a pitch. However, thanks to a magic baseball card, Ed Hamner (who also played baseball, until he got injured) actually winds up preventing his death. What's more, after the card is torn up at the end, keeping Ed in Monte's body, he went on to have a long and successful career.
• A minor example, but according to Word of God, The Walking Dead takes place in a universe where George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) was never made. As a result, zombies never became a pop-culture phenomenon, which is the main reason why the zombies in the series are never called zombies.
• Watchmen (2019): Being as it is a Sequel Series to the comic book series of the same name, the miniseries takes place in a world where costumed heroes existed (though Doctor Manhattan was the only one with superpowers). Specifically it takes place in an alternate present over three decades after the events of the original source material, and deals with the ramifications of Adrien Veidt's psychic squid attack on New York City (which is colloquially known as "11/2"):
  • The current President is Robert Redford, who succeeded Richard Nixon and has served for seven full terms, with his ongoing eighth term being his last. One of the candidates running to succeed Redford is Senator Joe Keene, Jr., whose father drafted the Keene Act, which in turn has been amended by Junior through the "Defense of Police Act" to allow cops to wear masks and take up costumed identities.
  • President Redford granted reparations for survivors of the Black Wall Street Massacre and their descendants (implied to be via a form of tax exempt status), which are disparagingly called "Redfordations" by those who oppose them.
  • Aside from being legally mandated to hide their identities and to keep their jobs a secret to everyone except their spouses, cops in the present-day Watchmen universe are subject to strict regulations about how and when they are allowed to use their guns, to the point where their weapons have to be remotely unlocked before they can even be brandished.
  • Vietnam has been a U.S. state since the 1970s, meaning nearly all US flags sport a blue disc bearing 51 stars over the thirteen stripes. America essentially turning Vietnam into a colony has drawn criticism from other countries and has spawned a secessionist insurrection, which killed Angela Abar's parents in a bombing. Angela was born in Vietnam two years before it became part of the union.
  • After Vietnam gained statehood, African-Americans moved there in droves both to find new opportunities and to escape the racist policies of the Nixon Administration. This led to the birth of a unique black subculture which included Blaxploitation-style "Black Mask" movies centered on costumed heroes of color. One of these characters is actually named Batman, as a take off on Nite Owl. Angela took her masked identity from Sister Night, which became the Watchmen universe's answer to Shaft with a highly memorable theme song.
  • Both smartphones and the internet do not exist, with people still having to rely on landlines and pagers for communication. It is explained on Peteypedia that society came to believe that the technology synthesized by Doctor Manhattan was carcinogenic, resulting in a massive federally-mandated recall. However, most cars (both old and new) appear to run on clean lithium-based, non-carcinogenic electric power cells, and are said to have been on the roads since the recall. A throwaway conversation in the original work has Manhattan mentioning that lithium is a good source of energy, and one that he is capable of helping people synthesize, so it seems that people were able to figure it out on their own after he left Earth.
  • Even with this, comic-book super-tech is still available — in the first two episodes a vehicle similar to the Owlship/"Archie", X-Ray Goggles, and personal ornithopter packs (which are pretty damn unreliable) used by Paparazzi all appear. And a major plot point in the episode "This Extraordinary Being" (which provides a major reveal about how Judd was lynched) is that the freaking Klan managed to create man-portable brainwashing machines all the way back in The '30s.
  • Supplementary material reveals that Roger Ailes owns the parent company of The New Frontiersman and is still alive, presumably with his hemophilia never agitated by the stress of sexual harassment accusations. He tried to sue the Veidt Corporation in 2018 for alleging the CIA had assassinated Veidt.
  • Saint Petersburg, Russia, is still referred to as "Leningrad", Red Scare (a Russian immigrant/expat) identifies as a Communist, and a Soviet flag is seen on Scare's desk, suggesting that the Cold War never ended and the Soviet Union still exists.
  • Dan and Laurie successfully prevented the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, which led to their arrest.
  • Some films are different. Instead of Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg directed an award-winning historical drama about the 11/2 squid attack entitled Pale Horse (after the band that was playing at Madison Square Garden when the squid appeared). A scene is described involving a girl with a distinct red coat that is lifted from Schindler's List. Max Shea's Fogdancing was adapted into film twice (once by David Cronenberg) and in this universe influenced Jacob's Ladder and Shutter Island.
  • One of the Peteypedia documents mentions New York City recovering at a "glacial pace" following the squid attack. Thirty years later the city's tourism agency is still testing ad campaigns designed to entice people to visit, yet those people are still fearful of another catastrophic squid drop. Contrast this with how New York managed to recover relatively quickly after the 9/11 attacks.
  • Nine Inch Nails are known as The Nine Inch Nails after a suggestion by Sean Parker, started as a band rather than Trent Reznor's solo project (Peter Murphy, Atticus Ross and Peter Christopherson were full-time members) and Reznor himself withdrew from the public eye after The Downward Spiral flopped. Their last album, The Manhattan Project, was recorded in "The Crater", the empty field in North Wales where Ozymandias's castle used to be, on a dare, and was unreleased for years until 2019.
  • Tobacco is a controlled substance, according to Looking Glass.
• The West Wing, like House of Cards and Political Animals, has this in the background. The last real-life President who is identified is Richard Nixon, and the US election rotation is two years off from what it is in the actual world (i.e. President Bartlet was first elected in 1998 and ran for re-election in 2002, instead of 1996 and 2000 respectively). This isn't particularly explained, but some fans have assumed the theory, stemming from Nixon being the last real-life President identified, that in the show's universe he did get impeached and removed from office, and as a result it triggered an election at an extraordinary date.
• Yellowjackets features a fictional town: Wiskayok, New Jersey and a fictitious plane crash, but otherwise features things that are present in real-life. The scenes with the main cast as adults are set in 2021, but with no sign of any pandemic, however, a character who is running for state senator is referred to by a photographer as being the "queer Kamala".
• Bryan Cranston's legal drama Your Honor is set in summer 2020 without any reference to COVID-19, with public life unrestricted and normal. This indicates the pandemic never occurred in the show's universe.

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