David Simon first read Philip Roth's novel in 2004 but found it politically irrelevant at the time, and even declined an offer from Tom Rothman in 2013 to adapt it for television.

Simon decided to adapt the novel after the 2016 US election that saw Donald Trump elected president, feeling that Roth's story had become 'perversely allegorical,' and he brought in his longtime collaborator Ed Burns, with whom he had previously worked on The Wire and Generation Kill, to co-write the series.

The 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville influenced how Simon and Burns approached the adaptation.

Philip Roth himself weighed in with suggestions, proposing the family be renamed Weiss (Simon ultimately chose Levin instead), that the family be portrayed as assimilated Americans, and that the creators avoid directly conflating the fictional Lindbergh with Donald Trump.

Simon consulted Roth about how to end the story, but the author offered no solution, so Simon and Burns crafted a more ambiguous conclusion than the novel's, one that involved the characters more directly in the end of the Lindbergh administration and broadened the perspective beyond just Philip, the novel's narrator.

The opening theme song is 'The Road is Open Again,' a song written in 1933 to promote Franklin D. Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration, performed for the show by actor Michael Kostroff, who also plays a recurring character in the series.

Filming took place across multiple real locations in 2019, including Jersey City, Paterson, Newark, Cranford, New York City, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.

Scenes were shot in Baltimore aboard the SS John W. Brown, a real World War II-era Liberty ship docked at the Canton Dock.