All the Presidents’ TV Shows: Series That Defined Each Era
NBC’s recent Parks and Recreation quarantine special was a delight for a variety of reasons. Chief among them was the fact that, even though it was set during the current pandemic, it seemed to be transporting us back to the time in which the comedy originally unfolded. Few series in recent memory have been as clearly tied to a moment — and, specifically, a presidential administration — as Parks and Rec. The show’s belief in the power of government to make people’s lives better — and, more broadly, in the obligation members of a community (be they friends, family, or, as Ron Swanson once put it, “workplace proximity associates”) have to help one another in times of need — made it the standard-bearer for the hopefulness of the Obama era.
That flashback to a saner, safer version of the world inspired Rolling Stone to look back all the way to John F. Kennedy — often referred to as “the first TV president” for his command of the medium — to identify the series that best captured the feeling of each administration. These aren’t necessarily the best or most popular shows of each era, but the ones that best reflect either what that presidency was saying about what America was, what was really happening in the country at the time, or something about the man in the Oval Office himself.
For each administration, we chose one representative comedy and one drama; presidents who were elected to two terms got two apiece. All shows had to have aired at least briefly during an administration to qualify, even if some or most of their run happened under another presidency.
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John F. Kennedy, Comedy: ‘Dick Van Dyke Show’ (CBS, 1961-66)
Image Credit: (Kennedy & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (Dick Van Dyke Show) CBS via Getty Images There was a dashing young couple in the White House, and a dashing young couple to match in New Rochelle, New York. TV comedy writer Rob Petrie (Dick Van Dyke) and wife Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) weren’t exactly JFK and Jackie, but there was something more exciting about them than their suburban counterparts under Eisenhower. (Rob and Laura slept in separate beds, but it was clear they had a livelier sex life than, say, Ward and June Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver.) The Dick Van Dyke Show didn’t reinvent the sitcom wheel that I Love Lucy had created in the previous decade, yet it seemed contemporary and polished, just like the New Frontier Jack Kennedy had promised.
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John F. Kennedy, Drama: ‘The Twilight Zone’ (CBS, 1959-64)
Image Credit: (Kennedy & Television) Shutterstock, 2 (Show) Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images If The Dick Van Dyke Show represented the giddy hopefulness of the Kennedy years, then the original, and best, run of Rod Serling’s sci-fi anthology franchise served as a weekly reminder that all was not perfect in Camelot. Its parables about conformity, paranoia, nuclear apocalypse, and more provided harbingers for a decade that started off in seeming normality and ended with war, riots, moonwalkers, and flower power.
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Lyndon B. Johnson, Comedy: ‘Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.’ (CBS, 1964-69)
Image Credit: (Johnson & Television) shutterstock, 2;(Pyle) CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images A Texan was in the Oval Office, and rural comedies were all the rage on television, particularly at CBS, which played home to The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Green Acres, among others. This Andy Griffith spinoff, where guileless pump jockey Gomer (Jim Nabors) enlisted in the Marines, is the pick, though, because its attempt to portray a peacetime version of the U.S. military even as our involvement in Vietnam kept escalating mirrored the political rhetoric of the day, which either ignored the war altogether or treated it as a conflict that would be over any minute now.
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Lyndon B. Johnson, Drama: ‘Star Trek’ (NBC, 1966-69)
Image Credit: (Johnson & Television) Shutterstock, 2;Moviestore/Shutterstock William Shatner’s moralizing, womanizing Capt. James T. Kirk was a blatant “JFK in space” figure, though the iconic sci-fi series aired most of its run under Kennedy’s successor. Kirk’s tendency to ignore the Prime Directive and interfere in the development of interstellar cultures reflected our own ill-conceived intervention in Southeast Asia, while the relatively diverse crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise and many of the stories echoed the civil-rights struggle of the era.
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Richard Nixon, First Term, Comedy: ‘Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In’ (NBC, 1968-73)
Image Credit: (Nixon & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (Laugh In) Moviestore/Shutterstock Saturday Night Live has been on far too long to be associated with any one president. The most famous moment for its NBC sketch-comedy predecessor, though, came early in the run, when Nixon — then running for office again after years in the political wilderness — cameoed to transform the show’s most famous catchphrase from exuberant request to puzzled query: “Sock it to me?” With its rapid-fire sketches and hippie imagery (including a young Goldie Hawn frequently dancing in full flower-child regalia), Laugh-In presented itself as the quintessential counterculture comedy. Really, though, it was more evenhanded than the political satire of its peer The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, on CBS — which seemed about right for an era that was celebrated for the Summer of Love and Woodstock, even as Tricky Dick got elected twice.
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Richard Nixon, First Term, Drama: ‘The Mod Squad’ (ABC, 1968-73)
Image Credit: (Nixon & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (Mod Squad) Moviestore/Shutterstock This drama about a trio of young rebels — famously described as “one black” (Clarence William III’s Linc), “one white” (Michael Cole’s Pete), “one blonde” (Peggy Lipton’s Julie) — recruited to be undercover cops was, like Laugh-In, caught between two political extremes. On the one hand, its heroes were meant to represent — and appeal to — the counterculture, and the series touched on hot-button issues like abortion and Vietnam vets coming home with PTSD. On the other, they were working with the police, and the show largely used them to maintain the status quo: They were there to prevent violent revolutions rather than join in on them.
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Richard Nixon, Second Term, Comedy: ‘All in the Family’ (CBS, 1971-79)
Image Credit: (Nixon & Television) Shutterstock, 2(All in the Family) CBS via Getty Images Norman Lear’s groundbreaking family comedy was far more clear in its intentions and feelings about Nixon’s America than the two previous shows on the list, but his audience didn’t always see it that way. As All in the Family depicted a generational clash between blue-collar reactionary Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor) and his progressive son-in-law Michael “Meathead” Stivic (Rob Reiner), it was always explicitly on Meathead’s side. But studies showed a Rorschach effect: Liberals who watched the show saw Archie as the fool and Meathead as the hero, while conservatives believed the show, like Archie, was on their side.
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Richard Nixon, Second Term, Drama: ‘Columbo’ (NBC, 1971-78; ABC, 1989-2003)
Image Credit: NBCU Archive/Getty Images Plenty of early-Seventies cop dramas, like Kojak, captured the urban decay and white flight that descended in the wake of late-Sixties riots. But really, is there a better detective show to mark the ignoble end of the Nixon administration than one about a dogged investigator who — like a certain pair of real-life Washington Post reporters — had a knack for unraveling the schemes of powerful men who thought themselves above the law?
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Gerald Ford, Comedy: ‘Happy Days’ (ABC, 1974-84)
Image Credit: (Ford & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (Happy Days) Henderson/Miller-Milkis/Paramount Television Garry Marshall’s nostalgic sitcom about a Wisconsin family in the Fifties didn’t become a huge hit until after Ford lost the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter. Still, even its modest early success symbolized the sweeping sense of dissatisfaction felt by so many in post-Watergate America. Who wants to spend time in a fictionalized version of the depressing present when it’s so easy for the TV to transport you back to the peace and prosperity of the Eisenhower years?
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Gerald Ford, Drama: ‘The Waltons’ (CBS, 1972-81)
Image Credit: (Ford & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (The Waltons)Moviestore/Shutterstock If anything, the enduring Seventies power of The Waltons — about a rural Virginia family of nine in the Thirties and Forties, based on the autobiographical novel Spencer’s Mountain, by the show’s creator, Earl Hammer Jr. — is the Happy Days effect squared. In this case, viewers were eager to travel all the way back to the Great Depression rather than think more about the present state of things. Good night, President Ford. Hello, John-Boy!
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Jimmy Carter, Comedy: ‘M*A*S*H’ (CBS, 1972-83)
Image Credit: (Carter & Television) Shutterstock, 2;(M.A.S.H.)Moviestore/Shutterstock During the Carter administration, viewers of the long-running military comedy — technically about Army surgeons in the Korean War, but really about Vietnam — began regularly seeing star Alan Alda’s name in the writing and the directing credits. As Alda exerted greater influence behind the scenes, both his heroic doctor, Hawkeye Pierce, and M*A*S*H as a whole became more dramatic, more political, and — to the derision of a certain segment of the audience that already felt the same way about the man occupying the White House during this time — more sensitive.
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Jimmy Carter, Drama: ‘Charlie’s Angels’ (ABC, 1976-81)
Image Credit: (Carter & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (Charlie's Angels) Moviestore/Shutterstock On the campaign trail in 1976, then-Gov. Carter admitted to Playboy, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” Though the adultery remained theoretical for one of our best-behaved presidents (both in and out of office), Carter’s remarks came at a time when American culture as a whole was becoming more hedonistic. Many of the biggest hits during his administration came to be dubbed a wave of “Jiggle TV,” most famously this show about a trio of gorgeous detectives (initially played by Farrah Fawcett, Kate Jackson, and Jaclyn Smith) who solved crimes while running around in tight outfits that often left no room for bras.
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Ronald Reagan, First Term, Comedy: ‘Diff’rent Strokes’ (NBC, 1978-85; ABC, 1985-86)
Image Credit: (Reagan & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (Diff'rent Strokes)AP/Shutterstock First Lady Nancy Reagan actually played herself in a 1983 episode of this sitcom, where she delivered her “Just Say No” anti-drug message to young Arnold Jackson (Gary Coleman). But even before that cameo, the series — in which Arnold and brother Willis (Todd Bridges) are adopted by Philip Drummond (Conrad Bain), the well-to-do employer of their late mother — captured a lot of what was in the air in the early days of the Reagan administration. It presented a post-racial vision of America where Arnold and Willis’ blackness was mainly just fodder for jokes about strangers confused by their relationship to Mr. D, and the show pioneered the concept of the “Very Special Episode” with stories about child molestation and kidnapping. But it also very much venerated Mr. D’s wealth, and suggested that the best way for poor minorities to get ahead was to be saved by a rich, white businessman.
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Ronald Reagan, First Term, Drama: ‘Hill Street Blues’ (NBC, 1981-87)
Image Credit: (Reagan & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (Hill Street Blues) NBC-TV Reagan swept into office on a campaign to undo the perceived moral rot of the previous two decades. Some cleaning jobs are more complicated than others, though. This groundbreaking serialized cop drama — the great-grandfather of Peak TV — depicted various attempts to repair the blight in its unnamed city, whether through the thoughtful leadership of Daniel J. Travanti’s Capt. Frank Furillo (an Alda-Carter-ish sensitive hero if ever there was one) or the gleefully violent tactics of James B. Sikking’s conservative tactical-unit commander, Howard Hunter. There was even one cop, undercover detective Mick Belker (Bruce Weitz), who had gone feral from his time on the mean streets, and was known to occasionally take a literal bite out of crime.
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Ronald Reagan, Second Term, Comedy: ‘Family Ties’ (NBC, 1982-89)
Image Credit: (Reagan & Television) Shutterstock, (Family Ties) 2Ubu Productions The poster boy for Reagan’s “Morning in America” improbably turned out to be Alex P. Keaton (Michael J. Fox), the gleefully conservative son of ex-hippie parents Steven (Michael Gross) and Elyse (Meredith Baxter). The show was meant to be told from the parents’ point of view, but Fox proved such an obvious star that the focus largely shifted to him, with Steven and Elyse offering wisdom as needed, but mostly powerless to influence their charismatic, materialistic oldest child.
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Ronald Reagan, Second Term, Drama: ‘Dynasty’ (ABC, 1981-89)
Image Credit: (Reagan & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (Dynasty) Spelling/ABC Television As Americans in the Eighties focused increasingly on money and comfort, television began presenting one aspirational wealthy family after another. (See: the Ewings of Dallas, a show that had its biggest cultural moment — “Who shot J.R.?” — come at the tail end of the Carter years; the Huxtables of The Cosby Show, a series we understandably don’t talk about much anymore.) Perhaps the poshest clan of all was the family of Denver mogul Blake Carrington (John Forsythe, previously famous as the voice of Charlie on Charlie’s Angels) on this long-running, oft-imitated soap opera filled with board-room battles, shoulder pads, and periodic brawls between Blake’s current wife, Krystle (Linda Evans), and his ex, Alexis (Joan Collins).
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George H.W. Bush, Comedy: ‘Murphy Brown’ (CBS, 1988-98, 2018)
Image Credit: (HW Bush & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (Murphy Brown)CBS via Getty Images The Bush administration beefed with several TV shows of the era, including the time POTUS lamented that American families needed to be “a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons.” (The Simpsons took revenge with an episode where Bush moved to Evergreen Terrace and began a petty feud with Homer.) Meanwhile, Bush’s VP, Dan Quayle, went after fictional TV newswoman Murphy Brown (Candice Bergen) for setting a bad example by choosing to be a single mother. It was a testament to the force of Bergen’s performance that Quayle talked about Murphy like she was a real person. But she also made an interesting target because the sitcom was so much about liberal boomers like Murphy reckoning with both middle age and their place in a post-Reagan America. In the end, the Murphy writers made the dispute part of the Washington-based show, with Murphy getting revenge on Quayle by dumping a truckload of potatoes onto his property, recalling his notorious flubbed spelling of the word.
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George H.W. Bush, Drama: ‘Twin Peaks’ (ABC, 1990-91; Showtime, 2017)
Image Credit: (HW Bush & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (Twin Peaks)Lynch-Frost/Kobal/Shutterstock The Bush years were an odd, transitional time for TV drama as much as they were for America as a whole. The country was waiting to shift from Reaganism to Clintonism, just as television was in a bit of a holding pattern between Hill Street Blues and the Nineties boom of future classics like ER and Homicide. So why not go with the strangest possible show for a strange time in our nation? David Lynch and Mark Frost’s blend of murder mystery, soap opera, supernatural horror, surreal comedy, and more was unlike anything else TV has ever seen. Though it was mostly unappreciated in its time, it was a huge influence on the TV-drama revolution that took place while Bush’s son was in office. (It’s a favorite of, among others, Sopranos creator David Chase.) Like Murphy Brown, Twin Peaks had a one-season revival in the late 2010s, though it proved more adaptable to the times than its Bush-era comedy counterpart.
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Bill Clinton, First Term, Comedy: ‘Seinfeld’ (NBC, 1989-98)
Image Credit: (Clinton & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (Seinfeld) NBCTV/Kobal/Shutterstock The most famous Seinfeld episode, “The Contest” — where Jerry Seinfeld and his friends place a masturbatory wager on who can go longest being “master of your domain” — aired two weeks after Clinton’s election, and the show’s most popular seasons all ran during his tenure. It was a perfect match of show and president: slightly naughty stories for a commander in chief who had already survived several sex scandals on the campaign trail, and a “show about nothing” for an era when America was so peaceful and prosperous, few felt the need to worry about anything bigger.
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Bill Clinton, First Term, Drama: ‘NYPD Blue’ (ABC, 1993-2005)
Image Credit: (Clinton & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (NYPD BLUE)Steven Bochco Productions This cop story from Hill Street Blues writers Steven Bochco and David Milch was famous for featuring partial nudity and profanity previously forbidden on broadcast-network television, which seems a good fit for a POTUS whose indiscretions were blamed for coarsening our public conversation. And the acclaimed drama’s mix of liberal and conservative leanings — often inviting viewers to cheer along when antihero cop Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) beat confessions out of suspects — were right in step with an administration that pushed for a draconian crime bill for which Clinton would later express some regret.
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Bill Clinton, Second Term, Comedy: ‘Sex and the City’ (HBO, 1998-2004)
Image Credit: (Clinton & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (Sex and The City) Darren Star Productions/HBO By the time this adaptation of Candace Bushnell’s sex advice column — starring Sarah Jessica Parker as a fictionalized Bushnell, and Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis, and Kim Cattrall as her friends — debuted, the special prosecutor’s investigation into President Clinton’s relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky was front-page news. As details about oral sex and semen-stained dresses wormed their way into everyday discourse, a show where women gave each other frank advice about anal sex and funky spunk seemed a bit less outré than it might have in an earlier era.
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Bill Clinton, Second Term, Drama: ‘The West Wing’ (NBC, 1999-2006)
Image Credit: (Clinton & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (West Wing)Warner Bros Television Aaron Sorkin’s Emmy-winning powerhouse was transparently a fantasy vision of the Clinton administration, with Martin Sheen as a centrist Democrat governor-turned-POTUS who managed to avoid sexual transgressions. (Though Jed Bartlet’s decision to conceal his relapsing, remitting case of multiple sclerosis was arguably a much bigger crime than Clinton lying about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.) The majority of The West Wing ran during the George W. Bush years — including a clumsy, patronizing episode about the origins of Islamic-fundamentalist terrorism, produced in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 — but it’s not a coincidence that the show’s two best seasons by far were largely produced and aired while its inspiration was working out of the titular portion of the White House.
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George W. Bush, First Term, Comedy: ‘Arrested Development’ (Fox, 2003-06; Netflix, 2013-19)
Image Credit: (Bush & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (Arrested Development)20th Century Fox Television This farce about a spoiled Orange County, California, family coping with the incarceration of its patriarch, George Bluth (Jeffrey Tambor), started out as a relatively timeless story about the foibles of the pampered elites. Soon, though, Arrested turned into an unmistakable satire of the younger-Bush administration and the war in Iraq, including an episode where grandson George Michael (Michael Cera) finds his pop-pop hiding in a spider hole and inspects him in a frame-for-frame re-creation of the capture of Saddam Hussein. Eventually, it turned out the entire Bluth Co. was in bed with Hussein, while youngest son Buster (Tony Hale) was only spared having to serve in Iraq when his hand was bitten off by a loose seal. (The series resurfaced years later with additional seasons that aired under both Presidents Obama and Trump; whatever magic Arrested once possessed, it was long gone, like one of Gob’s many failed tricks.)
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George W. Bush, First Term, Drama: ’24’ (Fox, 2001-10)
Image Credit: (Bush & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (24) Fox-Tv/Kobal/Shutterstock The pilot episode of this real-time thriller, originally scheduled to debut in September 2001, climaxed with a terrorist blowing up a mid-air passenger plane to conceal her activities. Then 9/11 happened. This at first required some awkward editing to remove an image now scarring to the entire nation, but 24 quickly leaned into its accidental role as a show about terrorism at a time when no one could talk about anything else. In time, the series proved so popular and influential that clips of Kiefer Sutherland’s relentless Jack Bauer torturing information out of suspects (“WHO DO YOU WORK FOR?!?!”) were used to promote and justify the Bush administration’s use of similar techniques overseas.
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George W. Bush, Second Term, Comedy: ’30 Rock’ (NBC, 2006-13)
Image Credit: (Bush & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (30 Rock)NBCUniversal/Getty Images Sure, The West Wing and 24 at different points presented thinly-disguised versions of real-life political figures and events. But Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), the smugly conservative NBC exec who reluctantly mentored Tina Fey’s comedy producer Liz Lemon, actually went to work for the Bush administration for a bit, with the title “Homeland Security Director for Crisis and Weather Management,” and even may have had sex with Dick Cheney while both were under the influence of a “gay bomb.” Top that, Sorkin.
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George W. Bush, Second Term, Drama: ‘The Wire’ (HBO, 2002-08)
Image Credit: (Bush & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (The Wire)Nicole Rivelli/HBO Like several shows for two-term presidents, David Simon and Ed Burns’ epic about the death of the American city — as seen through the eyes of cops, drug dealers, politicians, schoolkids, reporters, and others — could just as easily apply to the early Bush years as to the late ones. The third season — an Iraq War allegory year, with stand-ins for both the collapse of the Twin Towers and the search for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction — even aired in 2004. But, as the series’ brainiest character, Detective Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) once put it, all the pieces matter, and the sum total of what The Wire had to say about the crumbling of the American Dream couldn’t be fully appreciated until its respective president was nearly out of office.
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Barack Obama, First Term, Comedy: ‘Parks and Recreation’ (NBC, 2009-15)
Image Credit: (Obama & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (Parks and Recs) NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images The funny thing about Parks and Rec being so closely tied to Obama (down to those fan-made “Knope” posters inspired by the Obama campaign’s “Hope” ones) is that the series wasn’t created with him at all in mind. Greg Daniels and Michael Schur wrote the pilot during the darkness of the 2008 financial crisis, and their only thought was that government was going to have to get more involved in people’s lives, at least for a while, to try to undo the damage that banks and lax regulations had created. But a show inspired by one era wound up a perfect fit for another.
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Barack Obama, First Term, Drama: ‘Breaking Bad’ (AMC, 2008-13)
Image Credit: (Obama & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (Breaking Bad)Ursula Coyote/Sony Pictures Tele If Parks and Rec was the sunniest possible vision of the Obama years, then Breaking Bad was its dark mirror image. In telling the story of dying chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) becoming a drug kingpin, the series brutally captured the sense that the system had already failed all of us, and the only way to thrive was to focus on getting what you felt entitled to, no matter the collateral damage. That level of anger over the state of things, coupled with the audience’s unrelenting love of the increasingly terrible Walt — the latest charismatic asshole in the vein of Tony Soprano, Vic Mackey, and Don Draper — presaged what was growing in the shadows of the era, and what would come into full bloom in the administration to follow.
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Barack Obama, Second Term, Comedy: ‘Veep’ (HBO, 2012-19)
Image Credit: (Obama & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (VEEP)Colleen Hayes/HBO Parks and Rec acknowledged the limitations of its own brand of optimism by regularly illustrating how hard it was for Leslie and friends to get anything done in an increasingly divided country. Still, that show’s dysfunctional local government had nothing on the national one presented in Armando Iannucci’s brutal political comedy, starring the great Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a vice president utterly lacking in any political beliefs other than what would help her gain, and hold onto, more power. Selina Meyer’s amorality wasn’t unique in the Veep world, where its fictionalized Washingtonians believed in nothing or in the dumbest possible things (like the anti-math campaign platform of Timothy Simons’ Jonah). And its satire ultimately proved more like prophecy; its last few years played out under President Trump, where real-life headlines proved far more absurd than anything the Veep writers could invent.
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Barack Obama, Second Term, Drama: ‘Empire’ (Fox, 2015-Present)
Image Credit: Season 7, episode 3 (debut 4/14/19): Brian Huskey, Anna Chlumsky, Gary Cole, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tony Hale, Kevin Dunn. (Empire) Chuck Hodes/FOX Just as President Obama was the first African American man to serve as president, his administration marked a time when people of color were finally getting a chance to thrive in other traditionally white spaces, including the realm of the prime-time soap opera. Co-created by Lee Daniels, Empire — about the battle between hip-hop mogul Lucious (Terrence Howard) and ex-wife Cookie (Taraji P. Henson) for control of a family-run entertainment company — mirrored the increasingly mainstream nature of hip-hop and black culture in general. And it shifted the focus of classic Eighties soaps like Dynasty and Dallas from money as the sole endgame to celebrity being just as important (if not more), making it a key chronicler of the age of Instagram.
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Donald Trump, Comedy: ‘The Good Place’ (NBC, 2016-20)
Image Credit: (Trump & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (Good Place)Colleen Hayes/NBC Michael Schur’s metaphysical follow-up to Parks and Rec was also conceived without knowing what the era in which it aired would be like; Schur first wrote it when he assumed that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election. Instead, a comedy about a group of people discovering that the afterlife is fundamentally broken turned out to be the perfect show for coping with the rampant dysfunction and malevolence of the Trump era, when all our assumptions about how our own country does and should work have proven to be hopelessly naive. The series’ weekly philosophy lessons about what we all owe to each other proved an essential tonic for getting through all the bad news down here on Earth.
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Donald Trump, Drama: ‘Watchmen’ (HBO, 2019)
Image Credit: (Trump & Television) Shutterstock, 2; (Watchmen) Mark Hill/HBO There are so many shows from the past few years that couldn’t be more obviously about the ongoing calamity at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, while based on a book written in the Reagan years, latched onto something unnerving about the Trump administration’s rampant misogyny and push to shatter the separation of church and state. HBO’s Succession captures not only the bottomless pit of a Fox News-style media empire that could help create the political rise of someone like Trump, but also the failson quality of so many people in and around Trump’s administration. But HBO’s Watchmen embodies the surreal, racist brutality of these days more than anything else. In adapting the classic comic book (also an Eighties artifact), Damon Lindelof looked to the current state of our world and saw white nationalism as the existential threat that nuclear war was under Reagan. Despite the characters running around in ridiculous costumes, the series repeatedly laid out the danger lurking beneath the notion of Making America Great Again. And sadly, the show’s ongoing debate about who should and shouldn’t wear masks has taken on a new, real-life resonance in the months since Lindelof concluded his take on the story.