By Jim Rutenberg / New York Times News Service
LOS ANGELES—It’s got to be one of the best jobs in Hollywood: Sit around all day dreaming up fantasy political scenarios that are either so over-the-top crazy or wishfully idealistic—plotlines that could never play out in real life—that they provide the sort of escapist television viewers crave.
Then came Campaign 2016, the November 8 results and, finally, President Donald J. Trump.
Suddenly, the writers who work on political television shows were competing less with one another and more with real life because of a president who transformed their seemingly escapist scripts into something resembling nonfiction—and scrambled the traditional notions of political cause and effect that they tended to base their drama upon.
The New York Times gathered some of the leading political dramatists in America for a group discussion on the CBS Studio Center lot here last month: Shonda Rhimes, creator of the ABC hit Scandal, whose stories seem to be the stuff of a political fever dream; Frank Pugliese and Melissa James Gibson, the showrunners of House of Cards, whose back-stabbing and bald aggression present a behind-the-curtain view of political machinations that would never take place out in the open; Barbara Hall, the creator of Madam Secretary, the more optimistic CBS drama; and David Mandel, of Veep, which came up with such truly absurd scenarios that you couldn’t imagine them happening.
The following are edited excerpts from the conversation.
For Veep, do you have to worry what happens in the real world?
David Mandel (Veep): You do and you don’t. We spend a tremendous amount of time thinking up the worst things a politician can say or do. We have a story line where [Selina Meyer, the show’s protagonist, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus] is now an ex-president and trying to build her library. And nobody particularly wants a Selina Meyer Library. She ends up in the Republic of Georgia, doing some election monitoring, and two guys offer her money for her library if she’ll see the election in a certain way. And that just seemed like that’s about the worst thing you could think of to do, that makes her look horrible, hopefully in a funny way. But now we just look like geniuses or something.
Even before this, all your shows had little elements that presaged some of what we are seeing, right?
Shonda Rhimes (Scandal): We had the Hollis Doyle character [a Machiavellian oil tycoon-turned-presidential candidate], who we made up as the craziest person to ever run for president. He was very Trump-like.
We had the Russian problem, too. Our mystery woman was supposed to start speaking Russian, and you were supposed to understand that the Russians were trying to undermine the United States government through the election. And all of the sudden I realized we have to rebreak the entire back half of our season and turn it into something else.
Melissa James Gibson (House of Cards): Wow.
Rhimes: No matter what we do, the audience is going think we wrote the news.
And you don’t want to look like you’re ripping from the headlines?
Rhimes: No!
In Madam Secretary, which plays off current events a bit more, are you trying to write closer to the news? For instance, you seemed to predict the US-Iran nuclear agreement that came to pass.
Barbara Hall (Madam Secretary): A little bit. But we are set a little bit in the future. That’s how the Iranian peace deal came about, because we were just starting to talk with Iran, and we thought, let’s go to the most dramatic possible conclusion. We’ll have a full-on peace agreement and the Iranian president will come here. That’s not exactly what happened, but it was close enough that we sort of ran up against the headlines.
And now the challenge for any show that’s trying not to write the news, or to stay ahead of the news, is how do you do that?
Before last year, had you ever seen a political environment that was this unpredictable, so much so that you had to worry?
Frank Pugliese (House of Cards): What we’re competing with to a certain extent are the 24-hour news channels. To me, it’s the nature of writing a TV show, that you’re satisfying and dissatisfying the audience. You’re frustrating them and creating a certain amount of anxiety and trying to keep things unresolved to keep the story going. And what’s tough is suddenly we have 24-hour news channels doing that with their own political figures.
But more with Trump than anything else, right?
Pugliese: Trump is as frustrating and confusing and irreconcilable as any TV character. In a way, he is probably the ultimate bad dad. You think about The Sopranos, Don Draper (on Mad Men). And now he’s in the White House, not just the house down the street.
Gibson: When I look at him, I see this 70-year-old white man in a bit of a panic about the world changing around him, and he’s just fighting so hard to hang on to borders and really all these outmoded notions.
Shonda, your show is the most outrageous of the ones represented at the table. Do you feel like now you need up the ante to get crazier than reality?
Rhimes: Our show is basically a horror story [laughter]. Really. We say the people in Washington are monsters and if anybody ever knew what was really going on under the covers, they would freak out. So they can do anything, they can murder people, they kill people and they get away with everything all the time.
But that was based on a world in which [Barack] Obama was president and our audience was happy about what was going on in Washington and they felt optimistic. You can always tell any horror story you want to when the light is on. But now the lights are off, and now I think people don’t want to watch horror stories, they want you to light a candle somewhere.
As comedy writers, aren’t you guys itching to jump on whatever is the event du jour?
Mandel: No, because we’re not a du jour show. The show has never been about current politics; it’s about politics in general. It’s about power. I think I heard the phrase it’s pulling back the curtain of what Washington is really like, what these people are really like. They are not the noble West Wingers. They’re down and dirty and speak quite horrendously and crave this power. We take it from the comedy perspective. I think you guys approach power from the drama perspective in really good ways.
Gibson: What’s interesting about Trump, though, is that he has made subtext text. So with a show like ours, where Frank turns to the camera and he’s in this very complicit way, letting us in on something, Trump just—he does it.
Pugliese: There is something weird about when politics and entertainment and journalism all start to bleed into the same thing. It starts to feel a little funky.
How much do you feel like you’re competing with the show that is now American politics? Are you having to do things in ways you wouldn’t have had Hillary Clinton won?
Mandel: I’m sure you guys have all thought about this, but are people just so sick of it, regardless of their side, that they would much rather just watch a show set in a junkyard as opposed to anything that has anything to do with D.C.?
Was there anything that you scripted to be horrible for a character—like a huge, supposedly career-ending political bungle that now wouldn’t be much of a problem?
Mandel: Veep was based on five years of screw-ups that constantly, for lack of a better word, whacked her back down. She had ambition, obviously, to be president, ultimately got there in a very backward way, but was constantly striving, and then whether it was a leak or a bad tweet or a microphone left on, was sort of whacked down by these things. And now we have entered a world where these things happen and have no effect. And in some cases pushed him further along.
If you were scripting the Trump presidency, where would you have it go from here? What is the most dramatic thing that could happen?
Pugliese: What I’m curious about is the education of Donald Trump—who is showing up to try to educate him, and how they educate him, and taking advantage of that aspect of who he is as a character.
Rhimes: The most dramatic thing that could happen to him is transformation. If he actually became a hero and actually became a good president, that is the most dramatic, most crazy, most bizarre thing that I could imagine happening to Donald Trump.
Hall: I’m going with education and transformation, but in my show, it would be the female secretary of state who got him there [laughter].
Image credits: Brinson+Banks for The New York Times