SHOWS DIVE INTO POLITICS FUNNY BONE-FIRST
Shows take aim with razor-edge satire, outrageous stories
Difficult times call for Difficult People.
In the opening minutes of the acerbic Hulu sitcom’s third season (now streaming), Julie (Julie Klausner) and Billy (Billy Eichner) are stopped by a man looking for a newly erected Donald Trump statue in New York. Revolted, the struggling actors dump trash in his car.
It’s a seemingly throwaway gag that sets the tone for Difficult People’s most politically charged season yet, joining the ranks of other current and upcoming comedies to address the Trump administration head-on. Comedy Central’s The President Show, wrapping its first season Aug. 24, stars Anthony Atamanuik as the commander in chief giving his version of a fireside chat, while the network’s Broad City promises to bleep Trump’s name in its upcoming fourth season. (“There’s no airtime for this orange (person),” co-creator/star Ilana Glazer says.)
And Showtime this fall plans a 10-episode, still-untitled animated series, executive-produced by Stephen Colbert and set in the White House. The comedy will feature computer-generated versions of the president and Cabinet, with a loose structure that allows for a portion of each episode to be written mere days before airing in order to stay topical.
“I’m hoping we’re going to do a show that will piss off everyone a little bit,” says Showtime president and CEO David Nevins. The workplace comedy “will attempt to reflect the inner life of this character, so people will try to understand that and Stephen’s take on it. I expect it to be unexpected.”
The cable network follows latenight talk shows and series that have had a field day spoofing the current head of state.
After the election, “it’s not like we had this conscious decision ‘Let’s do a show about Trump,’ but of course we were open to it,” says Comedy Central president Kent Alterman. “We heard an unbelievable (number) of pitches that were responding to Trump, and it was everything from reality shows to fake reality shows to scripted shows to animated shows. There was a plethora of ideas coming at us from a number of different directions and the only barometer was that we didn’t want to do anything just for the sake of it.”
Rather than depict the president himself, Difficult People satirizes day-to-day life in the Trump era. Julie, for instance, is forced to get prescriptions at a Quiznos doubling as a free clinic in an alternate universe where Obamacare has been repealed. Another story line centers on Billy, a gay man, as he facetiously signs up for a Mike Pence conversion therapy kit to make $6,000.
Quasi-political digs are peppered throughout the show’s rapid-fire pop-culture references, which series creator Klausner hopes are funny without being preachy.
“I hope this season will be a nice combination of distraction from what’s going on and political (commentary), in that it shows outsiders thriving and surviving, and resisting and persisting in the current political climate,” Klausner says. Trump-related humor “is just part of the fabric of the world in which we live, and to me, reinforces Billy and Julie’s worldview: that the world in which we live stinks, and everybody’s against them.”