HBO At a time when Hollywood studios are looking for stories that are somehow both fresh and instantly recognizable to distraction-prone consumers, why don't we see them produce more alternate history dramas? The subgenre is hardly wanting for source material — since at least the publication of the early 19th-century French novel "Napoleon and the Conquest of the World" (which apocryphally imagined the diminutive dictator victorious in his ambitious military campaign), writers have returned to this well countless times. Some of these stories have already been adapted into prestige dramas that have garnered critical acclaim. As proven below by the...