Election’s ‘truths’ top TV fiction, execs say
There was the Access Hollywood tape exposing Donald Trump’s lewd comments about women. The barrage of WikiLeak-ed Hillary Clinton emails. And, of course, Ken Bone and his red sweater. With its seemingly daily plot twists, cliffhangers and quirky side characters, the presidential election has given new meaning to must-see TV.
Maybe it was inevitable. Trump is a reality TV star-turned-Republican presidential candidate. Clinton has celebrities, including Julia Roberts and Jon Hamm, supporting her as the Democratic candidate. The process of choosing the next commander-in-chief would take on the sort of high-stakes pacing of a popular drama series, the buffoonery of a comedy and the tawdriness of a lowbrow reality show.
We spoke to show runners of political-theme TV shows to get their thoughts on how real life is stacking up against fiction: Barbara Hall of CBS’ Madam Secretary, about a former CIA analyst and professor (Tea Leoni) who is thrust into the position of secretary of state (a role inspired by Hillary Clinton); David Mandel of HBO’s Veep, a political satire that tracks the political career of narcissist Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who briefly becomes president; and Jon Harmon Feldman of ABC’s Designated Survivor, about a low-level Cabinet member (Kiefer Sutherland) who becomes president after a catastrophic attack kills everyone above him in the line of succession.
Q: Could you have scripted something like this election?
Hall: I’m not nearly that imaginative. Even if we were trying to go for something with this kind of tone, we couldn’t have scripted this.
Feldman: I don’t think that we could have scripted it and had a reaction other than skepticism that anything could play out like this or anyone could behave like this. I think critics would have found it preposterous.
Mandel: It’s madness, and it’s unbelievably crude. While I know a lot of people say Veep is occasionally crude, I certainly like to think that we are artfully crude. Most likely we’d all be fired if we wrote a 10th of what has happened thus far. In some ways, this year’s election has become some sort of insane single-camera comedy. It comes complete with guest roles, like Ken Bone. We could call the comedy Misery.
Q: Does the insanity of it make your job harder?
Mandel: Honestly, it makes everything harder. I couldn’t be happier that (Selina Meyer) is out of the White House on our show and we’re moving on to the next phase of her career.
Feldman: The presidential campaign is almost playing out like a reality show, and the appeal of reality is that you’re drawn to larger-thanlife characters in an aspirational sense, and you’re also repulsed by them and, therefore, are able to feel somehow morally superior to them.
Q: What’s it like having a politically themed show during an election year?
Feldman: It offers opportunities, and it offers challenges. I think there was the question: Will people find our take on politics refreshing in the face of the real campaign, or would they have a degree of political fatigue?
What I strongly suspect is that politics in real life and politics in television or film are not necessarily equated. I don’t think they take up the same bandwidth in our minds. One is news and one is entertainment, and people are pretty savvy about how they separate those things out.
Q: Have you and the writers mined the debates for material?
Feldman: I think we’re having the same conversations that many people are having, which is, wow, did that just happen? Because I think real life is playing out in such a — for lack of a better word — dramatic or sensational way, the irony is (that) real life doesn’t feel real. So our job as writers is to try to, the best we can, make it seem entertaining and also, to some degree, real as well.
Hall: There are two different tracks. We talk about everything as people who are engaged in the election, but then when it comes to talking about our world, it’s a completely different discussion. One thing that’s interesting for us this year is we’re doing a parallel election. Part of what we really like to do is pull the curtain back on the process and see into intricacies of the political process that (viewers) might not know about.
Mandel: We talk about it all the time. I do think we find ways of folding in things. We won’t be tackling it in the realm of an election cycle, but there are big issues that have revealed themselves — certainly over the last eight years but even more during this election — that we’ll be addressing.
Q: What has been the most TV-like moment in this election cycle?
Mandel: The funniest moment to me — I want to reach back to that Republican debate where Ben Carson got lost and kind of stood there and the other candidates kept coming out and were trying to help him. That’s the kind of thing that is funny and good and resonates.
Feldman: Every time you think you’ve seen the most sensational moment, a new one comes along. I’m going to say whatever happens next is the most TV moment.