Shorter Jonah Goldberg: I bet those stupid liberal TV-show-makers thought they were making the Soviet Union look good, but I saw it and I still hate communism farrrrt.
Longtime fans will be pleased to hear Goldberg's traditional empirical method is unchanged:
I gather the show’s creators think they are being subversive or at the very least very clever by getting viewers to root for the "bad guys." Those quotation marks are essentially Hollywood’s, not my own.
Maybe that was in the press packet. And:
Getting back to the slipperiness of popular culture, I have to wonder if the producers realize how much the show undercuts the Left, at least the Hollywood Left.
Leftists in Hollywood were always much more serious about communism than Leftists in New York and Washington, which inevitably led to the Socialist Workers Party purge of 1984. And:
Avoiding spoilers as much as possible, one character, an African-American Communist spy recruited from the civil-rights movement, should have the Left furious. If you take the character seriously (which I don’t necessarily recommend) he demonstrates not only the murderous commitments of the hard Communist Left, but he basically vindicates J. Edgar Hoover’s most extreme rhetoric about the civil-rights movement!
Expect this to be rolled up in conservative minority outreach: "Oh yeah, what about that guy on that show?"