Mark McKinnon OF ‘THE CIRCUS’ ON SHOWTIME

Do you find that politicians have a preconceived notion of what to expect when they see you coming to film a segment for “The Circus”? They do. They have a pretty good understanding now of what we do, which actually makes our job easier. When they didn’t know what we were doing, they were very skeptical about letting us in. Now that they’ve seen it, they get it. We’re not trying to trick anybody or surprise anybody. We really want to hold up a mirror to American politics from the inside of the rooms where the decisions are made. Our ultimate goal is to help people better understand our politics, and we think that’s good for the people who are in office as well as for voters. Since the nature of “The Circus” is to document what happened politically during the previous week, are you able to do any advance planning? We’ve got some big thematic areas that we want to delve into, but with this show, there are a lot of detours. Things come at us so fast and so unexpectedly, we’re always prepared for that. We may go into a week with one idea, then on Thursday, do a complete 180. It’s not just whatever’s in the news, though. We try to go a little deeper. What would you say about the exit of Mark Halperin and the addition of Alex Wagner for this season? It was my intent from the very beginning to have kind on an evolving, rotating cast. We’d been talking to Alex for a long time, and she had some other obligations, but they cleared the deck so she could do it. It allows us to change up the chemistry, and I think that’s interesting for viewers.