Overlooked TV Pilot: The Man in the High Castle

Maybe The Man in the High Castle isn't an overlooked pilot.  Maybe all of you saw it, but since I haven't seen much discussion of it on blogs, I thought I'd at least mention it.  It's based on Philip K. Dick's novel of the same name.  Since I read book well over 40 years ago, I don't remember a lot about it.  I remember enough, however, to know that the premise of the proposed series is the same as that of the novel: the U.S. has lost WWII.  As a result, the western U.S. is ruled by the Japanese, while the eastern half belongs to the Germans.  There's a neutral strip somewhere around the middle.

In the proposed series, it's about 15 years after the war, and it's clear that there's an underground resistance that's fighting in both halves of the country.  One of the keys is a film called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.  It shows an America that won the war, and some people believe that it's true, not a hoax.  I recall that in Dick's novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a book, not a film, but I don't mind the change.  It's a lot easier to show a film than passages from a book.

The look of the pilot is great, there was a nice twist at the conclusion, and the cast does a good job.  There's a lot about the cops and the enforcers of both the Germans and the Japanese, which I don't remember from the book.  It could be that the series (if it gets made) will become just another us-against-them thriller, which the book was not.  I'll probably still watch it though, because I'm curious to see where it goes.  

You can watch the pilot here if you haven't seen it.