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.
Presidents, in TV drama, don’t only serve as vehicles for political commentary or lessons in moral leadership. They’re also dramatic devices. They function like important pieces on a chess board. They are powerful; they can move in many directions with force.
But they are bound by rules, protocols and conventions. They are the embodiment of a system that ensures pieces only move the way they are permitted to. For this reason, maybe, presidents have rarely been the main characters of TV shows about the presidency; the aides, agents and climbers around them have more room to have fun.
So a series like “Scandal,” in which fixers work to disappear the embarrassments and transgressions of Washington’s powerful, can only exist if the concept of scandal exists. Villainous TV presidents, like President Logan on “24” or both Presidents Underwood on “House of Cards,” plot in secret because of the now-absurd premise that they would fear consequences.
Fictional presidents might be corrupt or scheming or selfish or hypocritical. But they are institutionalists, and they are the personification of institutions. Even if they bend the rules, they are the embodiment of a larger, rules-based order.
What happens, then, when you suddenly have a presidency that goes to war with institutions and rules? It means that most of the mundane assumptions of government dramas, conventions that we’ve become used to for decades, feel jarringly anachronistic, like an establishing shot of the New York City skyline from before 2001.
In “The Diplomat” on Netflix, for instance, the U.S. ambassador to Britain (Keri Russell) handles the fallout from a terrorist attack in which Russia is implicated, a job that in part involves handling the familiar political concerns of the president (Michael McKean). There are plenty of wild twists, but now the truly far-fetched part is its bedrock assumption: A U.S. government that at heart sees Russia as an adversary and the NATO countries as allies. “The Residence,” likewise, involves a state dinner with Australian officials that was set up to smooth over the previous administration’s alienation of allies.
You can feel the dissonance even in series more peripheral to politics. The spy intrigues of “The Agency” presume an America that wants to maintain vigorous engagement with its postwar allies. The level of trans-Atlantic cooperation in “3 Body Problem” now seems more outlandish than its alien invasion.
Has anything on TV come close to depicting our actual politics today? “Succession” imagined an alt-right disrupter elected with the help of powerful media allies, but we never actually saw him govern. “Paradise” oddly channels Elon Musk in the person of Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson), a tech billionaire who builds, and holds the real power in, its underground city. But the series is both too fantastical and too convinced of the saving power of empathy to really evoke the present.
You have to look backward — for instance, to “The Plot Against America,” the mini-series based on the Philip Roth novel that imagines a fascist-sympathizer government elected at the outset of World War II. Its President Charles Lindbergh, as in real life, supported an “America First” movement. (One of his key advisers is the antisemitic automotive tycoon Henry Ford.)
More than nearly any political drama, it captures the upended feeling of living in a world where friends are now enemies, enemies friends, belligerence virtue and empathy weakness.
The truest echoes of our current presidency, though, may come from shows not actually about presidents. Not least among these is “The Apprentice,” whose Trump Tower elimination scenes remain the best primary source for the Trumpian concept of executive power: a boss ruling by gut and caprice, fostering uncertainty and competition among his subordinates to get the best results out of them.
But taking in the spectacle of the second Trump Administration, from the Musk-led Cabinet meetings to the audience of billionaires at the inauguration, I found myself strangely reminded of the short-lived 2009 NBC curiosity “Kings.”
True to its title, “Kings” is not about a president but King Silas (a leonine Ian McShane) — based on the biblical King Saul — who rules the near-futuristic land of Gilboa. (Of course, our current president has depicted himself as a king, too.) He claims to have been chosen by divine providence and he holds court in a sleek, corporate tower, his rule backed by a dizzyingly wealthy oligarch (Dylan Baker). Rewatching it, I can’t help but see a dramatization of the C.E.O.-run monarchy espoused by the influential right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin.
“Kings” (now streaming on the Roku Channel) is a weird, weird show, too strange for the network audience in its single season. Yet it somehow seems more current than the realistic presidential dramas of today. It suggests a lesson, at least, for anyone trying to capture the disorientation of the current political moment in a series. When the world turns upside down, sometimes you need to adjust the camera angle.
