Hollywood & Politics Interim: How During the 21st Century TV Explored The Presidency As Never Before – And The Messages They Sent Their Viewers That May Have Resonated by 2016

 

When The West Wing became both a critical and popular hit just prior to the 2000 election it broke the unwritten rule that shows involving politics could be popular hits. Because this was Hollywood, countless imitators arrived on network, cable and eventual streaming in the nearly quarter of a century that followed.

In the years since the 2016 election there have been countless books trying to argue why certain artistic trends in the industry may have led the groundwork of Trump's political rise. The majority focus on the popularity of reality TV, some discuss superhero comics, some discuss the rise of action movies and apocalyptic TV shows. Yet oddly enough none of them are willing to look at the most direct link: how much political TV series began to dominate the landscape and frequently become critical and popular hits. As I said in regard to the 2003 recall election of Grey Davis and the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger, there may be a very good reason for that. In this case, it's slightly subtler but it's definitely there.

Some of this change was felt in The West Wing itself in the aftermath of Aaron Sorkin's departure in May of 2003. Prior to that it had always been a show that leaned heavily into the staff at the Bartlet White House being more responsible for what happened that anything else. One rarely saw members of the cabinet during the first four seasons (and less during the three that followed) and understandably there was little mention of the Supreme Court after Season 1 except in passing. But Congress did show up throughout the first four seasons and it was seen primarily as adversarial, though the Democrats were seen as just as much an obstacle, if not more so, then the Republicans.

As soon as John Wells took over he completely changed that relationship, essentially turning the new Speaker into the enemy, essentially doing more to shape the Bartlet administration's day to day battles then ever before.  He would reject their candidate for Vice President and force them to take one they felt was inferior, which in turn led to the administration increasingly backing away from battles with Congress and the staff retreating more and more from them.

This was arguably the worst decision in Wells' entire tenure (and he made some pretty bad ones going forward). The administration had once been full of erudite, intellectual figures: now they seemed smaller and less intelligent, willing not merely to compromise but to avoid fights altogether. From a dramatic standpoint it made sense but considering that Bartlet was now a lame duck he should have been willing to charge ahead harder without having to worry about reelection.  This had been the mood that Sorkin had begun during the second half of Season Four and it had the affect of having the staff grousing more and more about what they couldn't do anymore. When Bartlet attempted to negotiate a settlement between Israel and Palestine in the fifth season finale it was the kind of ambitious step the Sorkin show had considered – and it was by and large treated by everyone on the staff as out of touch, something they were basically refusing to get behind.

This would have been interesting had Wells been willing to follow up on it but by the sixth season he was essentially focusing on the next election and the Bartlet administration was increasingly becoming a side note. By this point other shows set in and around the White Housew were being formed – but they were sending similar messages.

24 is by far one of the greatest shows of the 2000s and much of its power came from how well, after Season 1, it incorporated the White House as being equally important as to what Jack Bauer and CTU were dealing with every day. Much of the brilliance in the show was how evenly it treated both Democratic and Republican Presidents with the same level of fairness: whether David Palmer or Alison Taylor was President they were equally capable of rising to great levels or being deeply flawed. Issues such as race and gender had nothing to do with how they governed.  To grade the White House on realism would be genuinely petty: this wasn't the kind of show 24 was.  What is worth mentioning is that you got the idea, particularly in the second half, of the idea of the President leading without involving the other two branches.

This wasn't true of David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) a man who from the moment we saw both as incredibly moral but also governed by realpolitik. This was particularly true during Day 2: when he learned that a nuclear bomb was on American soil, his first priority was finding the weapon and preventing it from going off rather than rushing to a military engagement. He was also more than willing to do whatever was necessary no matter how much his turned his stomach: famously he asked one of his secret service agent to torture the head of the NSA in order to find if it had a link to the weapon being on American soil.  (It did.)  When it ended up being something that could have undone his Presidency he stood by it as a necessary evil.

But even so there was a certain level of unreality. During Day 3 he was in the midst of his reelection campaign (the day took place during the Presidential debate against his Republican challenger). During the second half of the day the main story involving him was how his brother Wayne (DB Woodside) White House Chief of Staff had an affair with the wife of one of his biggest donors. In order to try and save his Presidency David turned to his ex-wife Sherry (Penny Johnson Jerald) who the previous day had played a role in the nuclear weapon ended up on US soil. Palmer had rejected her even before he became President with good reason and his turning to her even in this time of travail was unrealistic.

When it inevitably backfired the President agreed to cover it up. Sherry would then go to his opponent and tell him to use it as leverage in exchange for a place on his staff after he won the election. Both David and Wayne would try to solve it but it would backfire even more and Sherry would end up dead. The day ended with David Palmer telling Jack he wasn't going to stand for reelection.

In hindsight this part may be the only part that I believe something left-wing entered 24. Every other President that was to follow (how many is a matter of debate) believed in the importance of political power. Moreover every President that followed kept in with the mission statement of 24: the ends justify the means. David Palmer backing away from the Presidency – and consequently destroying any chance his party has to holding on to power in the election to follow -  can be seen as the kind of moral good the left believes that goes against politics in general.

To be fair to 24 the Presidents that followed (Republican and Democrat alike) were more than willing to use the full force of the White House to achieve their goals however bloodthirsty they could be achieving them. This would frequently lead to truly incredible drama, particularly in Day 5 both the shows finest hour and one of the finest season's in TV history. (At some point I will be writing about 24 on a separate entry for that reason.) But one wonders if in a sense it was arguing for a kind of grand unitary theory of the executive as a result: the idea that the President had absolute power to do whatever they wanted. To be sure the show argued against that quite a lot.

Indeed in Day 5 when it is clear that President Logan (Gregory Itzin) has committed a series of treasonous acts including the assassination of David Palmer his Secretary of Defense (William Devane) confronts him and demands he resign. Logan tells him that he can't argue if you don't sit in this chair. The Secretary tells him cooly: "Your chair is not a throne."

For all that you always got the feeling that the Presidency was basically being held in check not by Congress but by Jack Bauer. Despite the grey area he frequently occupied due to his actions you could tell that Jack had a sincere love of country and that nobody – not even the President – was above the law. That was not a feeling one got in what was the most prominent show set in the White House to follow: Scandal.

Its clear by the average reader as to how little regard I hold all things Shondaland so I'll try to keep my moralizing to a minimum and report as dispassionately as possible her political views.  That said I maintain that Olivia Pope was never anything that an African-American female Ray Donovan (this show debuted on Showtime just before Scandal's first season.) For the purposes of this article I'll saw the biggest difference between them is that it took Olivia and the show the entire series to make a realization about themselves that Ray knew by the time of the Pilot: that they weren't the heroes of the story but the villain.

It's worth remembering that by the time the second season has barely begun Fitzgerald Grant III (Tony Goldwyn) is not the legitimate President of the United States. Olivia and four other people engaged in a conspiracy to rig voting machines in at least one state so that he could become President. Olivia is the last person to be convinced to go along with the fraud but she's more than willing to cover it up so that she can have a job in the administration (and you know, screw the President). It's only when potential whistleblowers are killed that she chooses to leave the administration and become a 'fixer'.  To be clear she's fine with the crime and the coverup but not people dying to maintain that coverup.

For all  the show's threats about 'bringing down the Republic' – something, I would point, many members of the left would be fine with -  Olivia Pope is fine with the status quo. There's never any real reason why Fitz deserves to be President so much that it's fine to steal an election to make him so: Grant is a Republican and while he does give great speeches, there's never any sign during the show that he makes either any landmark policy or does immense good. If he did Scandal might have been a better show, arguing whether the ends justify the means. But Rhimes is not interestingly in telling that kind of story; she wants to tell a soap opera about the forbidden love between Fitz and Olivia. (The fact that this has the unfortunate parallels between so many white politicians and black women having no say, from Thomas Jefferson to Strom Thurmond, apparently never occurred to Rhimes or indeed so many fans of her work.)

 Indeed Rhimes has a brutal vision of democracy that is constant throughout the series: its too important to be left in the hands of the voters. Even before the 2016 election she's made it very clear that both of Grant's elections have been rigged, the first politically, the second by assassinating his son to create a sympathy vote.  Olivia and everyone else on Scandal cares nothing for the average person and little use for political power beyond simply having it.  All of the people in Grant's DC seem to want political power as if it’s a status symbol, a shiny bauble.

Which brings us to House of Cards a series that understandably has fallen into immense disregard because of the fate of Kevin Spacey by the end of Season Five. This series, at least for the first two seasons, had more realism in it then Scandal when it came to politics. Spacey had spent much of his time shadowing his real life counterpart: majority whip Kevin McCarthy. (That a Hollywood star would talk to a Republican in the halls of power for the purpose of a role is something that is now unthinkable, as I'll get to in the next entry in this series.) Watching Frank Underwood walking through the halls of Congress and the White House (aided by Claire) manipulating those around him to achieve first the Vice Presidency and then the Presidency was, frankly, a lot of fun and created some extraordinary drama.

The problem came, I'd argue, when Underwood became President. It was easy to believe that Frank could manipulate his underlings in Congress but now that he had the power he'd been seeking he had to get legislation through Congress, deal with foreign policy and then win reelection. And this was a lot more difficult to make entertaining while realistic. So the show started to lean really hard into its soap opera tendencies and that ended up doing something incredibly unrealistic with Claire.

Through the first two seasons the show had done an incredible job making it clear how brilliantly matched Claire and Frank were. But once Claire became First Lady, a job that was pure ceremony, it was going to work. So first they made her Ambassador to the UN, absent any approval from Congress. This was treading on thin ice in terms of realism. Then they essentially spent much of Season 4 turning Claire into first a force against Frank's administration, then running the White House when he was shot and finally deciding to have her become his running mate, something that the Constitution doesn't allow. It says something that even as much as Rhimes was tearing every part of reality down and made clear that Mellie Grant had political ambitions of her own the show never even considered making her Fitz's Vice President despite the fact his original one ran against him as a third party candidate and he had two others during his term. When Shonda Rhimes is sticking closer to reality then you are, you've really lost your purpose.

So why did they do it? Honestly for the same reason that Mellie Grant was running for President during the last seasons of Scandal, that Selina Meyer became President on Veep in the fourth season and Tea Leoni eventually became Vice President on Madame Secretary. They were all expecting Hilary Clinton to be the next President of the United States. And it's here I want to get to the major issue with Hollywood and their perception of how they drive the conversation.

While I'm willing to acknowledge that Dennis Haysbert's portrayal of David Palmer made it somewhat easier for Obama to attain the Presidency in 2008 I don't believe for a second it was the main or even one of the most important factors. So much of Hollywood's dealing with politics has always been based on their liberal wish fulfillment rather than the reality of politics. I don't think they wanted Obama to become President; I think they wanted David Palmer to become President and to govern like the Bartlet administration did.

Hollywood, like so many other leftists, believe that the President can just press a button and make government bring about left-wing social policy. The fact that it doesn't is merely because the President lacks the moral will to do so. So during the 21^st century they created a series of TV shows where the Presidents basically did just that. Either they did the right thing, regardless of the political cost (as David Palmer did at the end of Day 3) or if do they do the wrong this it is for a greater reason.  And because they are played by actors with great writers, they do so looking good and with not a hair out of place.

These Presidents were seen, I should add, by millions of Americans on a weekly basis on shows that were nominated for Emmys year in and year out and were acclaimed by some of the most prominent voices in television. Some, I should add, were watched by as many people as The Apprentice was, which debuted during this period long before Donald Trump was considering politics. (I will get to Hollywood's reaction to his candidacy, trust me.) If you argue that the latter made his candidacy more acceptable you must also argue that these same shows had to make it believable that these kinds of political shows had a similar impact on America, albeit at a subtler level.

And because of the bubble that Hollywood lives in perhaps that the reason they never truly accepted the groundbreaking candidacies of so many of these political candidates. A black President by 2008? We've already had two on 24 alone! They didn't want Sarah Palin to be Vice-President; they wanted Alicia Florrick. And it explains why they never liked Hilary. They might want a woman to be President but they wanted her to have the compassion of Alison Taylor and ruthless willingness to get things done that Claire Underwood had. And if she could be as funny as Selina Meyer, that would be good too. And if you're having trouble getting legislation passed, why get Frank Underwood to get it through the House and use Olivia Pope to handle any holdouts

That has to have been at least a factor in the way Hollywood looked at politics  before the 2016 election. They still thought you could pass legislation if you did multiple takes and that you could get the right candidate if you did an appropriate casting call. Their version of democracy was the one they wanted. The fact that it had no basis in reality, well, then you fix in rewrites.