The Sudden Weirdness of TV Presidents
You can't say that TV's fictional presidencies lack for drama today.
In 'Zero Day,' the former President George Mullen (Robert DeNiro) sleuths out the source of a debilitating cyberattack. In 'Paradise,' the feckless nepo baby President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) shoulders responsibility for humankind after an extinction-level volcanic eruption (and, no spoiler, gets murdered in his postapocalyptic underground shelter). In 'The Residence,' a White House state dinner becomes a crime scene.
Yet watching these political series lately, I am now struck by the same nagging feeling. This is all wrong, I think. It feels too normal — even the series that takes place in an enormous subterranean city.
It's not just that TV dramas can't compete with the show we're watching unfold on the news. Increasingly, they seem to operate in a parallel universe.
Historically, TV's presidents — Jed Bartlet on 'The West Wing,' David Palmer on '24,' Fitzgerald Grant on 'Scandal' — tend to share certain familiar traits. They are concerned with the appearance of stability and normalcy. They treat federal enforcement and intelligence agencies as part of a system to manage, not as internal enemies to be conquered. They make measured statements. They scold, even explode, but behind closed doors. They even have an aesthetic: a cool formality that speaks of quiet power without ostentation.
Compare them with our reality. President Trump erupts into a shouting match with Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, a nominal ally, in front of live cameras, ending the altercation by saying, 'This is going to be great television.' He renames the Gulf of Mexico, goes on the attack against Canada — a literal plot element from the movie 'South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut'— and stages a Tesla ad on the White House grounds.
To watch presidential fiction today is to feel how the polarity has suddenly flipped. The base line assumptions about how power works and presidents behave — about what America is in the world — have changed. And the details that TV series relied on to seem politically realistic suddenly make them feel like transmissions from an alternative timeline.
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