In 2024, I’m sick of silly political TV shows
The 2024 presidential election will be a story told on TV. I don’t need to see it anywhere besides CNN.
Between news coverage, heated conversations with relatives over holiday dinners and angry social media posts, it’s hard to avoid politics in your daily life these days. It’s especially hard to avoid all things donkey and elephant during a presidential election year. And when that news verges from disturbing to depressing, it can be exhausting and overwhelming. But some people can’t get enough.
Series like Max’s “The Girls on the Bus” (streaming Thursdays) are out to turn the electoral into the entertaining. The campaign trail series and the usual “Saturday Night Live” skits on NBC and Kate Winslet’s dictatorship bacchanalia “The Regime” on HBO present a showbiz version of real-life politics and foreign relations. But in an era when so much of government feels like theater, fictional stories about it lose a lot of their luster. When I sit down on my couch to lose myself in a new TV show after a long day, I don’t want to see yet more talking heads.
“Girls on the Bus,” based on a portion of the memoir “Chasing Hillary” by former New York Times reporter Amy Chozick (who co-created the series with “Vampire Diaries” producer Julie Plec), follows four female reporters on the campaign bus for a fictional presidential candidate. It gives political journalism a “Grey’s Anatomy” makeover, complete with sex between colleagues, petty rivalries, overwrought drama and an unexpected amount of law enforcement. The candidate the four leads – played by Melissa Benoist, Carla Gugino, Natasha Behnam and Christina Elmore − follow across the country is a woman embroiled in scandal (not a direct parallel of Clinton, despite the title of Chozick’s book), competing against a handful of overly earnest politicos that are straight out of “The West Wing” fan fiction.
As Benoist’s newspaper reporter Sadie and her colleagues type up the scandalous scoops from their candidate’s bus, I was struck by the inanity of the whole exercise. As much as the characters try to take themselves and their jobs seriously, the writers present them in the most unserious manner. Silly sex scandals. Lame TikTok jokes. Someone getting “canceled.” Bad banter. Head fakes toward the issues that really matter to a country divided.
It’s a tone that attempts to be tongue-in-cheek but verges on poor taste. It’s not fantastical enough to be escapist, but not real enough to be thought-provoking. Instead, it falls into an awkward, cringey middle ground.
“Regime” (Sundays, 9 EDT/PDT) certainly has the fantastical down, but its farce tends to go too far. Winslet plays a vain dictator of a fictional European country who leads her unwitting citizens into civil war with her increasingly poor decisions. The series of events has eerie parallels to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, among other tragic conflicts. Winslet’s silly fascist shtick is
funny for the first few episodes but quickly gets old. And so does the idea of any one person causing so much death and destruction, even if it’s not real. After all, the war in Ukraine is now two years old.
Even stalwart satirical programs like NBC’s “SNL” (returning March 30, 11:30 EDT/PDT) aren’t hitting the right notes this year. During previous election cycles, the nearly 50-year-old sketch-comedy institution flourished with radical impressions of the candidates, even influencing public opinion (Tina Fey and Sarah Palin, anyone?). But satire is supposed to have a point. The latest lame cold opens from Studio 8H have little to say other than to make the same old Trump jokes with a slightly different cast than four years ago.
Many people find escapism in this kind of storytelling. In a world full of somber issues and debates, there can be relief in treating lawmakers as clowns. It’s understandable, and I’m glad those people can find enjoyment in these shows. But all I get is anger and stress.
Maybe if things calm down on the national stage, I’ll be ready for the cartoonish energy of “Girls on the Bus.” After all, great political TV shows have found the right tone to match their eras before: “West Wing” under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, “Parks and Recreation” during the Obama era and “Veep,” especially under early Donald Trump, found something to say that complemented (but not necessarily complimented) the political realities of the time. But in 2024, no one seems to have figured out how to do that yet.
Until they can, let’s stick with zombies and detectives, shall we?