When Georgia Hunter first pitched her 2017 book, “ We Were the Lucky Ones ,” about her Polish ancestors’ fight for survival during the Holocaust, she was told World War II literature was a “saturated” market. This wasn’t meant to dissuade her from pushing forward with their harrowing story, but rather acknowledge that there is never a shortage of novels, films and series trying to reckon with the everlasting wounds of the war. It was no different when Hunter and producers Thomas Kail and Erica Lipez adapted the book into Hulu’s eight-part limited series, which premiered in March.
“We knew with this kind of story in particular, you have to go beyond the logline,” Lipez tells Variety. “It was so much about making sure people heard the full story, particularly when we were pitching it. As someone who thought they had a really good Holocaust education, what I knew immediately upon reading Georgia’s book was that embedded in this one family’s story were stories I’d never seen before.
” Finding that new perspective is what binds the five WWII-centric series vying for Emmy attention this year: “We Were the Lucky Ones,” Apple TV+’s “ Masters of the Air ” and “The New Look,” Peacock’s “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” and Netflix’s “All the Light We Cannot See.” It is a mighty wave of content that comes 85 years after the war began with Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, an event depicted in “We Were the Lucky Ones.” The series f.
