CTRL+Z: Rewritten

Kevin Perez-Allen

On a computer, Control Z is the undo button. When you press it, whatever you just typed gets reversed and allows you to make a different decision. What if you could press Control Z on some of the biggest decisions in history?

Every episode, we take a real decision by a real person, rewind it, and build the alternate timeline from scratch. What happens to the country, or the company or society, when the person in the room picks the other door?

Sony turned down Marvel's entire character catalog for $25 million.
Reagan fired 13,000 air traffic controllers instead of negotiating.
NBC almost killed Seinfeld after one episode.
King Edward VIII nearly kept the British throne three years before World War Two.

What happens if they go the other way?

Politics, business, sports, history, and pop culture.

New episodes weekly.

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21 episodes
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Avg 30 min
English

Episodes 21

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S1 · E24
Yesterday · 44 min
Pope Clement VII Hits CTRL+Z
On June 8th, 1528, Pope Clement VII signed a decretal commission — a document giving two cardinals the power to end Henry VIII's marriage on English soil, with no appeal to anyone — and then ordered it shown to the king once and burned. Fourteen months later, on July 23rd, 1529, one of those cardinals stood up in a converted monastery hall at Blackfriars and adjourned the court for the harvest. It never reconvened. Signing would have cost Clement almost nothing on paper. Popes had been dissolving royal marriages for 400 years, and Alexander VI granted Louis XII of France one in 1498 on a case so thin the queen produced witnesses to her husband's boasting. Clement himself offered to bless a wedding between Henry's daughter and Henry's illegitimate son to make the problem go away. What stopped him was a Spanish army that had sacked Rome in 1527 and held him in a fortress for 6 months, commanded by the queen's own nephew. What if he'd let that first document stand? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the annulment Rome refused, and follow the ripple to today: a prince born at Greenwich in 1531, an Englishman in white robes in Rome, a letter from Edinburgh that gets a polite refusal, and a bell tower in Yorkshire with the roof still on it. Nobody ever chisels the abbeys down, because on the one afternoon it counted, a frightened man in Orvieto signed his name.
- Transcript
S1 · E23
August 22 · 31 min
Muhammad Ali hits CTRL+Z
On April 28th, 1967, Muhammad Ali stood in a line of 46 men on the third floor of a Houston induction center while Lieutenant Steven Dunkley read the rule: take one step forward when your name is called, and the step itself puts you in the Army. The heavyweight champion of the world had spent the morning taking the physical and turning down a ham sandwich. Officers called his name 3 times, warned him that refusing meant a felony, 5 years, and $10,000, and got a written statement instead. The step would have cost him almost nothing. The government had offered his lawyers "all kinds of deals," no combat and no rifle, just boxing exhibitions for the troops, the same arrangement Joe Louis had in World War II. Sugar Ray Robinson begged him to take it. Elijah Muhammad forbade it, and the last man who defied the Nation of Islam was Malcolm X. Ali's feet never moved. What if they had? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the step he refused, and follow the ripple to today: a quiet Sunday in Cleveland, a nickname that stays on a Harlem playground, a swimmer lighting the cauldron in Atlanta, and a roll call at the 2016 ESPYs that runs 1 name short. Nobody ever marches behind Muhammad Ali, because on the one afternoon it counted, Cassius Clay stepped forward.
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S1 · E22
August 15 · 31 min
David Chase Hits CTRL+Z
SPOILER ALERT: This episode discusses the endings of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Lost, Parks and Recreation, Mad Men, The Leftovers, and Ozark. On June 10th, 2007, David Chase ended The Sopranos with a family eating onion rings in a New Jersey ice cream parlor, a bell over the door, and 10 seconds of black. Viewers across the country hit their cable boxes. The Boston Globe's television critic sat through those seconds certain his set had died and taken the review with it. Chase had spent years planning something else. Tony Soprano drives out of the Lincoln Tunnel at the top of all 86 hours of the show, and the last scene sent him back the other way, into Manhattan at night, to a meeting he wasn't walking out of. Then, driving down Ocean Park Boulevard in Los Angeles in 2005, Chase passed a little breakfast place, and a thought arrived: Tony should get it somewhere like that. The breakfast place won. What if it hadn't? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the last pages of the final script, and follow the ripple to today: a song that stays where it was in 1981, a corner booth in Bloomfield that stays furniture, a documentary that ends on an answer, and a decade of showrunners deciding what they owe an audience when the credits come. Nobody ever asks David Chase what happened to Tony Soprano, because 12 million people watched it happen.
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S1 · E21
August 8 · 24 min
Nelson Rockefeller hits CTRL+Z
On May 9th, 1933, guards climbed a scaffold in the lobby of the RCA Building and brought Diego Rivera down mid-brushstroke. His fresco for Rockefeller Center held a portrait of Lenin, and Rivera had refused Nelson Rockefeller's written request to paint it out. The wall got a canvas drape, and 9 months later, workmen chiseled 63 feet of plaster into powder near midnight. Buried in Rivera's refusal letter sat a counteroffer almost nobody remembers. He would trade the mural's nightclub scene for Abraham Lincoln, standing with John Brown, Nat Turner, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Lenin on one side, Lincoln on the other. Nelson, 24 years old, said no. What if he'd said yes? This week we hit CTRL+Z on May 8th, 1933, and follow the ripple to today: a finished fresco drawing Depression crowds past a communist in a capitalist lobby, a congressman waving photographs of the wall on the House floor, a velvet curtain going up in the McCarthy years and coming down for a funeral, and delegates at the 1964 Republican convention booing the man who kept it. Rockefeller Center destroyed the painting, hired another artist, and put Lincoln on that wall anyway. The mural Rivera lost became the most famous artwork America ever destroyed, and the version that survives hangs in an office lobby where tourists walk past it on the way to the elevator.
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S1 · E20
August 1 · 25 min
Sears Hits CTRL+Z
On January 25th, 1993, Sears killed the most famous catalog in American history, and Wall Street applauded. The Big Book was losing up to 175 million dollars a year, and Arthur Martinez, 5 months into the job, chose to eliminate it rather than shrink it. 113 stores closed. 50,000 jobs vanished. The last telephone order came in on May 27th. Two weeks before the announcement, in White Plains, New York, a company called Prodigy passed 2 million subscribers and became the largest online service in America. It sold merchandise on a screen, years before the web. Sears owned half of it. What if Martinez had connected them? This week we hit CTRL+Z on January 25th, 1993, and follow the ripple to today: catalog buyers rebuilding an online store item by item, an electronic Wish Book selling Sega Genesis consoles at midnight, Jeff Bezos choosing books because a 100-year-old competitor already sells everything else, and a dot-com crash that kills every internet store except the ones sitting on real warehouses. Sears spent a century shipping goods to people who couldn't reach a store, built the screen that came next, and dismantled the machine 18 months before the future needed it.
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S1 · E19
July 25 · 31 min
John Curtin Hits CTRL+Z
In February of 1942, the ships carrying Australia's best soldiers were in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and Winston Churchill turned them around without asking. Singapore had surrendered 7 days earlier. Darwin had been bombed 3 days earlier. Churchill cabled Prime Minister John Curtin that the 7th Division was going to Burma, that some ships lacked the fuel to come home, and that the President of the United States agreed. Curtin, 4 months into the job, said no. 4 times. Every Australian prime minister before him had given London what it asked for. The convoy turned south, the men came home, and they held the Kokoda Track and won at Milne Bay, the first clear defeat of the Japanese army on land in the entire war. What if he'd said yes? This week we hit CTRL+Z on February 22nd, 1942, and follow the ripple to today: 5,000 Australians walking 900 miles out of a lost Burma, teenage militia holding a mountain track alone, a division stranded in Ceylon while its country waits, and a nation that signs the same American treaty in 1951 but signs it as a follower instead of a partner. Australia came within one midnight cable of staying a colony in its own head, and the refusal is where the modern country began.
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S1 · E18
July 18 · 42 min
Stephen of Blois Hits CTRL+Z
In December of 1135, Henry the First of England died in Normandy, and the man best positioned to take his throne had already sworn twice not to. Henry had made every baron in his kingdom kneel and lay a hand on a chest of saints' bones, promising to crown his daughter Matilda after him. One chronicler says Stephen of Blois pushed to reach the relics first. Stephen took a ship instead. He was crowned at Westminster three weeks later, and England spent the next 19 winters tearing itself apart. A monk at Peterborough wrote that Christ and his saints slept. Out of that wreckage, Matilda's son built the writs, the traveling judges, and the 12 sworn neighbors that England, the United States, and most of the Commonwealth still run their courts on. What if he'd kept his word? This week we hit CTRL+Z on December 22nd, 1135, and follow the ripple to today:a woman crowned at Westminster 4 centuries before Mary the First, a warlord who dies old in his bed instead of excommunicated in the Fens, a child named William Marshal who never gets handed to a king as security for his father's promise, a northern border that stays where Henry the First left it, and an ordinary man with a stolen field who waits two generations for a court that will hear him. England came within one kept promise of its first queen, and the broken one is where the common law came from.
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S1 · E17
July 11 · 33 min
General Electric Hits CTRL+Z
In 1980, the most respected executive in America needed a successor. Reginald Jones ran General Electric, a company of 400,000 employees and the last original member of the Dow, and he chose by calling each finalist into his office and asking the same question: you and I die in a plane crash, so who should run the company? Jones picked Jack Welch. Wall Street crowned him Manager of the Century, every boardroom in America copied him, and the doctrine he made respectable, the shareholder above everything else, still runs the economy you live in. What if Jones had picked the engineer? This week we hit Control Z on the vote of December 19, 1980, and follow the ripple to 2026: corporate raiders who die as convicts instead of prophets, two planes that land safely on mornings we remember for crashes, a machinist in Erie with a pension, and a middle class that never stopped getting raises. The old American deal came within one boardroom vote of surviving, and the man who killed it built his creed on its ashes.
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S1 · E16
July 4 · 25 min
General Howe Hits CTRL+Z
4th of July Episode! In 1776, one British general had George Washington cornered. Washington's army was trapped on a strip of high ground in Brooklyn, its back to a river with no boats, beaten and out of room. General William Howe's officers begged him to storm the position and end the revolution that afternoon. He told them to wait, and two nights later a storm and a fog let the entire rebel force slip across the water and escape. That pause saved the United States before it existed. Howe had already lost more than a thousand men climbing a hill into American guns near Boston, and he refused to spend that many again for a victory he thought he could win slowly. His caution handed the rebellion seven more years, a French alliance, and eventually a country. What if Howe had given the order to attack? This week we hit Control Z on the assault Howe refused to launch, and follow the ripple all the way to 2026: a Washington who dies a forgotten farmer, an America that grows old under the Crown, a French king who keeps his head, and a twentieth century with no world wars to fight. The most powerful nation on earth came within one afternoon of never being born, and the man who saved it was trying to win the war for the other side.
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S1 · E15
June 27 · 38 min
Mikhail Gorbachev hits CTRL+Z
In 1991, the men around Mikhail Gorbachev spent two years begging him to send in the army and hold the Soviet Union together. He had already ordered three crackdowns that left unarmed civilians dead, but when it came time to crush the republics for good, he refused. By the end of that year the largest empire on earth had dissolved, and in Russia they have cursed his name ever since. It almost went the other way. The crackdown his hardliners wanted had been on the table the entire time, and the only real questions were who would give the order and whether the soldiers would obey. Across the same years, the other great communist power made the move Gorbachev wouldn't, sending its tanks into Tiananmen Square, and it's still standing today, richer and stronger than the Soviet Union ever was. What if Gorbachev had given the order himself? This week we hit Control Z on the order Gorbachev refused to give, follow the surviving Soviet Union all the way to 2026, and find the lesson underneath: the choice his own country can't forgive is the one that ended the Cold War and set Eastern Europe free.
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S1 · E14
June 20 · 20 min
Kodak Hits CTRL+Z
In 1981, a study Kodak paid for and signed told the company that digital photography would kill film within a decade. Kodak read its own warning and used it to squeeze a few more years out of film instead. The company that invented the digital camera filed for bankruptcy in 2012. It almost went the other way. Kodak got two clean chances to undo the same mistake, the first in 1981 and a second in 1996. Across the Pacific, a company caught in the identical trap made the move Kodak wouldn't, and it's still here today, inside most of the screens on Earth. What if Kodak had believed its own people? This week we hit Control Z twice on the warnings Kodak refused to read, follow both timelines forward, and find the lesson underneath: an early warning is only worth anything if you use it to leave.
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S1 · E13
June 13 · 35 min
Hannibal Hits CTRL+Z
In 216 BC, at a place in southern Italy called Cannae, Hannibal destroyed the largest army Rome had ever raised, tens of thousands killed in a single afternoon. With the capital nearly defenseless, he chose not to march on it. That restraint let a broken Rome survive, and the Republic that lived went on to build the Western world. It almost went the other way. Hannibal's own cavalry commander, Maharbal, urged him to take the horsemen and ride through the night, swearing they'd dine in the enemy capital within five days. Hannibal said he needed time to think. The reply Maharbal threw back has echoed for twenty-two centuries: you know how to win a victory, but you don't know how to use one. What if he'd listened, and turned the horses north at dawn? This week we hit Control Z on the victory Hannibal couldn't use, follow the march to the gates of Rome, and the very different world it leaves behind.
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S1 · E12
June 7 · 45 min
Anthony Kennedy Hits CTRL+Z
In December 2000, the Supreme Court stopped Florida's recount and let George W. Bush's 537-vote lead stand. Those votes, out of nearly six million cast, decided Florida, and Florida decided the presidency. It almost went the other way. Seven of the nine justices agreed the count was broken. They split on the fix. Five voted to stop. Four voted to send it back, set one standard, and finish. The man in the middle was Anthony Kennedy, who agreed the recount was broken and then voted to end it instead of fixing it. What if he'd changed his mind on that one question, and said count it instead of stop it? This week we hit Control Z on the vote that didn't switch, follow the recount to its finish, and the very different country it leaves behind.
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S1 · E11
May 30 · 34 min
Charles V Hits CTRL+Z
In October 1555, a dying Charles the Fifth split the largest empire in Europe between two heirs. Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and the silver of the New World went to his son Philip. The imperial crown, plus Austria and the lands to the east, went to his brother Ferdinand. The most powerful man in Christendom looked at everything he held and cut it in half. He almost didn't. Years earlier, Charles had schemed to keep it whole, to put every crown on his son's head and make Philip both King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor. The plan died in a family fight. The empire stayed divided. What if it hadn't? What if one devout, distant, Spanish king had inherited the whole thing, and then tried to rule German princes who'd never accept him? This week we hit Control Z on the division, and follow the unbroken empire as it breaks everything it touches.
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S1 · E10
May 23 · 27 min
Howard Hughes Hits CTRL+Z
In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that Hollywood's five biggest studios had been running an illegal monopoly. People remember the case as the government ordering the studios to sell their theaters. That's not what happened. The Court banned the worst practices, sent the theater question back to a lower court for a fresh look, and left the door open. Howard Hughes walked through it in the wrong direction. He volunteered to split RKO's studio from its theaters before the lower court even ruled. Every other studio watched him do it and followed. The system that had controlled American moviemaking since the 1920s collapsed in under a decade. What grew in its place changed everything. This week we hit Control Z on Hughes's signature, and follow what happens when the first domino refuses to fall.
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S1 · E9
May 16 · 27 min
Reagan Hits CTRL+Z
On October 20th, 1980, Ronald Reagan wrote the president of the air traffic controllers' union a letter calling their working conditions "deplorable" and promising his administration would fix them. PATCO endorsed him three days later. It was the first time the union had ever backed a Republican. Ten months into his presidency, 11,400 controllers walked off the job. Reagan gave them forty-eight hours to come back. When the deadline passed, he fired every single one of them, broke the union, and dared the FAA to keep the planes flying with less than a third of its workforce. The planes kept flying. The consequences took longer to arrive. This week we hit Control Z on the forty-eight-hour deadline, and follow what happens when the president who promised to fix the system decides not to destroy it.
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S1 · E8
May 10 · 29 min
Disney Hits CTRL+Z
In October of 2016, Bob Iger was 48 hours from buying Twitter for $15 billion. Both boards had approved. The lawyers were drafting. Goldman Sachs was working the weekend. Then Iger went through the user data one more time, read his own notifications, and couldn't sleep. Sunday morning he typed an email to his board with the subject line "cold feet," called Jack Dorsey, and killed the deal. Twenty-eight days later, Donald Trump won the presidency. Fourteen months after that, Disney bought 21st Century Fox instead, and Disney+ followed. This week we hit Control Z on the Sunday morning phone call, and follow what happens when the man who runs Disney decides to own the platform that hosts the president.
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May 10 · 1 min
Trailer- CTRL+Z: Rewritten
On a computer, Control Z is the undo button. When you press it, whatever you just typed gets reversed and allows you to make a different decision. What if you could press control Z on some of the biggest decisions in history?
- Transcript
S1 · E7
May 5 · 31 min
Pope Urban II Hits CTRZ+Z
In November of 1095, a sixty-year-old French pope stood in a field outside the cathedral of Clermont and gave the most consequential speech of the Middle Ages. Eight months earlier, ambassadors from the Byzantine emperor had asked him for a few thousand professional knights to help fight the Seljuk Turks. Standard contract work. Urban II sat with the request through the summer, then walked outside on November 27th and offered something nobody had ever heard before. Full remission of sins for everyone who took the cross. The crowd shouted back, "Deus vult." God wills it. They asked for soldiers. He gave them a holy war. This week we hit Control Z on the speech that launched the Crusades, and follow what happens when one man writes the smaller answer.
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S1 · E6
May 1 · 25 min
Blockbuster Hits CTRL+Z
In September of 2000, three guys from a tiny DVD-rental startup called Netflix flew to Dallas on a chartered jet they couldn't afford to make a pitch to the most powerful video rental chain on Earth. Reed Hastings asked Blockbuster CEO John Antioco for fifty million dollars. Antioco's mouth twitched at the corner. His general counsel told the room the dot-com hysteria was overblown. The Netflix guys flew home crestfallen. Today Netflix is worth four hundred billion dollars, and the only Blockbuster left in America is a tourist attraction in Bend, Oregon. He almost said yes. This week we hit Control Z on the deal that would have killed Netflix in the crib, and follow what happens when one man writes the check.
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