Eagerly jumping on the bandwagon of shows celebrating the entertaining awfulness of South Boston, Showtime has put into development The 4th Reich, a drama series about the city’s neo-Nazi faction, whose extreme hate for minorities runs counter to most Southies’ equal hate for everyone. Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal’s Tribeca is curb-stomping on Wahlberg ground by producing the show described as “American History X meets The Town,” concerning a reformed, ex-con neo-Nazi leader who agrees to become an FBI informant, then gets swept back up into “the Brotherhood” after his former best friend recruits his estranged teenaged son. Then, learning happens—the sort of learning that De Niro and Rosenthal hope will help “at-risk” young people see that violent extremism is not the answer, even if it makes for a compelling TV show.
Anyway, in case you haven’t had enough bitter irony mixed with roiling disgust today, announcement of the show on Deadline has prompted a lot of preemptive complaining from white nationalists, who are already angry over how the series will inevitably unfairly vilify and stereotype them—complaints peppered with comments about this being “the filth of Zionists,” for example. So, that’s fun.