Stephen Colbert draws on satire for ‘ President’
Late Show host produces Showtime animated series that skewers dysfunction in the Trump White House.
PASADENA, Calif. – For the anti-Trumpers who consider the president cartoonish, he soon will literally fit that description.
CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert — who can thank President Trump for vaulting him to the toprated late- night host— is behind Our
Cartoon President, an animated series due on Showtime Jan. 28. The half- hour series will open by anticipating Trump’s State of the Union address two days later. The show will then settle into its regular time slot Feb. 11, when Homeland returns.
The comedy portrays Trump and the extended White House staff as a dysfunctional family, and Eric, Ivanka, Donald Jr., Ted Cruz and Mike Pence have their own story lines. So do members of Congress. Even the hosts of Fox and Friends appear.
“The show is the interpersonal relationships of people you don’t see, the relationships you imagine they have,” Colbert told the Television Critics Association. “What we’re trying to capture with this show is how stable his genius is.”
Referring to Fire and Fury, the blockbuster book released Friday, he said: “I think Michael Wolff stole our 10 episodes. Everything that’s in his book is in our show, and we just guessed.”
‘ Black Lightning’
Amid a glut of comics- based superhero shows on TV, CW’s Black Lightning stands out: It’s no origin story. Instead, Jefferson Pierce ( Cress Williams) is a retired superhero whose former crime- fighting broke up his marriage. Now a high school principal and dad in fictional Freeland, he’s lured out of retirement when crime plagues the town.
The series ( due Jan. 16, 9 ET/ PT), created by the husbandand- wife team of Salim and Mara Brock Akil ( Girlfriends), asks: “How do we become our own heroes?” Mara Akil said.
Lightning is notable not only for its largely African- American cast but also for its focus on character stories and contemporary social issues.
Pierce is stopped by suspicious cops, and his older daughter, Anissa ( Nafessa Williams), becomes a cornrow-sporting sidekick, Thunder.
“The world that we created is an amalgamation of all three” previous versions of the comics, Williams said. “Even the ( original) ’ 70s version was socially relevant. One of the issues was all about illegal immigration.”
‘ Instinct’
CBS has an instinct for cop dramas, but this one has a bold new wrinkle.
Producers say Instinct ( due March 11, Sundays, 8 ET/ PT) is a first among network dramas in featuring a lead character who’s gay. Alan Cumming, whois gay, plays Dylan Reinhart, a professor ( and former CIA spy) whose book is being used as a tutorial for a serial killer. So an NYPD detective ( Bojana Novakovic) recruits him to solve the case. Instinct is based on a James Patterson novel and features Whoopi Goldberg as Reinhart’s editor and Naveen Andrews ( Lost) as his former partner at the CIA.
The milestone is not everything. “Most times we see a gay character on television, their gayness is their primary thing,” Cumming says. “( Here) it’s also the fourth- or fifth- most interesting thing about the character.”