ABC series ‘The Thirteen’ would imagine U.S. lost Revolutionary War

The British came and never left. That’s the premise of ABC’s planned alternate-history series “The Thirteen.”

Set in contemporary America, the show imagines what would have happened if the colonists had lost the Revolutionary War and were still battling the British for their independence.

The project, which will be produced by Lionsgate, is in the development stage, according to Deadline, which broke the news Friday.

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If it actually makes it to air, “The Thirteen” would be a rare TV-series treatment of what’s known as “alternate history,” a sci-fi subgenre that poses hypothetical what-ifs using real history as a jumping-off point.

Some have already pointed out the passing similarity of “The Thirteen” to “The Two Georges,” an alternate-history novel by Harry Turtledove and Richard Dreyfuss. But the novel has North America run by a governor named “Sir Martin Luther King” -- a character who presumably will not appear in “The Thirteen.”

What do you think of ABC’s new proposed series?

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