Why it took 8 years for Amazon's 'Man in the High Castle' to make it to the screen

"The Man in the High Castle" is one of the most acclaimed new shows of the moment, but its road to Amazon took eight long years.

The 1962 Philip K. Dick novel certainly had interested parties who considered producing it, but they all seemed to fall out. In depicting a world in which the Nazis won World War II, the TV series would be both expensive to produce and full of symbols (like swastikas) that may not be easy for an audience to swallow (as the ads for the Amazon show are already proving).

At one point, it looked like a series would never happen.

"It was just a really impossible sell," Philip K. Dick's daughter Isa Hackett recently told Business Insider. "We were so sad because our team had always been so devoted to this idea of doing this particular adaptation in this form. We sort of acknowledged that we're all going to have to go on our way, and it was sad."

About a month later, all that would change.

Here's the eight-year path "The Man in the High Castle" took from book to TV show:

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.