In a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter, Veep showrunner David Mandel mentions an issue that a lot of TV shows dealing with politics have had to address: a few of their jokes were just a little too on the nose.
Mandel writes that since Trump became president, even the stupidest things the Veep writers’ room can come up with for their fictional show about incompetent politicians is frequently topped by 45. The president keeps heightening and exploring this nightmare base reality! Mandel noted one joke that had to be cut when they realized it was very close to an actual news item:
So much of Veep is often just sitting around thinking: “What’s the dumbest thing that could happen?” They’re doing stuff that we couldn’t invent if we tried. The only thing we did have to change—it sounds like a bad joke, but it’s true—was a “golden shower” joke in one of the episodes where someone is yelling at Jonah [Timothy Simons] about a golden shower. We hadn’t filmed it yet, and we realized, “Oh, we need to change that” [because of the Trump-Russia dossier]. Who knew we would literally have to change a Veep golden showers joke because of the real president of the United States of America? It doesn’t get any weirder than that.
Mandel isn’t the only one who has been exhaustively questioned about how Trump’s bizarre, volatile, and unpredictable antics in his cabinet full of suspiciously connected officials has influenced their story telling.
Showrunner and co-creator Alex Gansa explained the destabilizing affect of Trump’s win on Homeland to THR in January:
I think the election result was as much of a shock to us as it was the rest of the country. To say that we took it calmly would be a complete lie. My first reaction was, “Oh my god, we are now counterfactual to the point of being irrelevant.” It took a while to dig ourselves out of that feeling.
Gansa gave an update on the vibe around Homeland for The New York Times in April, after a few weeks of wild wiretapping accusations:
First of all, I could never anticipate Trump’s antipathy toward the intelligence community. And second of all, it was such a wild card. What began to happen in real life felt in some ways so much more dramatic and so much more terrifying than what we were dramatizing on television. So all those things became concerns to us in the story room.
The creators of The Good Wife spin-off, The Good Fight, don’t mention their attempts to keep up with a Trump presidency during an interview with Deadline in February, but the pilot was pretty fucked, as the show was conceived as taking place in a world where Hillary Clinton won. But there is no escape in political television anymore:
DEADLINE: It was too late for you to completely rework the pilot episode following Donald Trump’s win beyond adding the brief opening scene. Will the new political realities be addressed in a more significant way in future episodes?
ROBERT & MICHELLE KING: We actually rewrote and shot another scene between Diane and McVeigh in which she bitterly congratulates him for his candidate winning, and how Sarah Palin can now win her ambassadorship. It was a good scene – showing how politics, in a post-Trump world, infected the most apolitical relationship – but it tended to slow down the first act. Future episodes have been significantly changed. We threw out most of what we developed – mostly because the world changed on us, and we wanted to keep up (we did something similar after the Snowden revelations) – so the episodes address the changes in the culture with the new administration.
There’s also Scandal, which had seemed to predict everything that happened on Election Night though Shonda Rhimes asserted in January that the series has no intention of drawing a parallel between the two fictional candidates on the show. The first five episodes of Season 6 were filmed before November 8, according to Vulture:
“I don’t really equate the two,” Rhimes said about “Scandal” and the election. “That’s not really the goal. If that were the goal, we would have waited until after the election to write about the election.”
Keeping real politics out of dramatized politics seems like a real headache these days, so it’s understandable that Rhimes would want Scandal to diverge from reality a little harder this season. But if she knows anything else about what’s gonna happen, she should tell us.