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A decade or so ago, the hottest trend in television was imagining what it might look like if politics became unfathomably chaotic. From the murderous hijinks surrounding the Fitzgerald Grant administration on “Scandal” to the skullduggery that allowed Frank Underwood to climb the federal government like a ladder on “House of Cards” to the whipsawing reversals of fortune that befell Selina Meyer on “Veep,” TV was the staging-ground for a feverish national imagination. Writers dreamed of a world that looked different from our own, in which the competent and technocratic Obama administration found itself, after the first midterms, grinding through gridlock. Real-world politics weren’t grim, exactly, but they tended to lack the element of surprise.
As Kamala Harris prepares to, possibily, become the next Democratic nominee for president, after Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he won’t run again, the comparison to those days couldn’t feel more stark: What a difference 10 years makes. There seems no real need for a dramatization of political chaos, since no one could have scripted the past three-and-a-half weeks of American life. This isn’t meant to minimize what will be the very real consequences of the November election, whichever way it goes, or, to cite just one of the many shocking events of this summer, the potentially life-and-death consequences of the attack on Donald Trump’s life.
But — all before Labor Day, said to be when most normal, non-online people (whoever they may be) tune into elections — we have so far seen a would-be assassin try to kill Trump, which briefly paused the ultimately successful effort to convince the incumbent president to abandon his re-election bid. As no one needs reminding, this pressure campaign was sparked by Biden’s historically poor debate performance on June 27 — which similarly lacked precedent, given that it took place at a debate between two men who were not yet their party’s official nominees. It was one of the most consequential television broadcasts of the century so far; it was also yet another spectacle squeezed into a season that has been bursting with them.
Attempting to understand the political developments of 2024 solely through the lens of what was and is on television would be hopelessly facile: To borrow a phrase, everything that has happened so far this year exists in the context of all in which we live and what came before us. But Donald Trump, who emerged out of the bog of American culture’s darkest and strangest impulses in 2016, was not simply a candidate, a president, and then a candidate again; he was an assurance that, for as long as he will continue to seek the Oval Office, politics will grant Hollywood’s wish as if it were made on a monkey’s paw. Presidential elections would never be boring again.
The elections of 2016 — “Access Hollywood” tape and all — and 2020 — conducted largely remotely in the midst of a pandemic and national uprising — hardly need retelling. But 2024 has somehow outdone them both, drawing out a series of events so completely novel and strange that the news began to take on a tilty, unhinged texture. Just about anything seemed possible well before, say, Biden’s announcement of his decision he wouldn’t be running for re-election after all: As a result, that announcement’s element of shock was sapped somewhat. What’s another pivot point in American history when so many have piled up so far?
Crucially, what’s changed since “House of Cards,” “Scandal,” and “Veep” is the fact that loopy disarray in the federal government is by now an everyday fact of American life; that the past month or so occurred within the presidency that promised to return, and somewhat succeeded for a time in returning, American political life to a more familiar place is among the sad ironies of the Biden presidency’s endgame. On “Veep,” for instance, Selina Meyer’s political fortunes as a misstatement-prone and brutally disempowered vice president — who eventually becomes president briefly after her boss suffers a misfortune, then has to introduce herself to America quickly — come to seem ludicrously implausible, a goofy frame on which to hang some jokes. If looking at the broadest contours, Harris’ 2024 looks so far not unlike the fictional Meyer’s 2010s. But the point, or a point, of “Veep” was its pushing the American political system as far as it seemed possible to go in order to explore Meyer’s particular psychology. Real life isn’t as interested in character development. And it doesn’t resolve as neatly.
The months ahead have — for those inclined to be sympathetic to the Democrats’ cause — promise; they have no small amount of peril as well, simply because we are, as former President Barack Obama said in his statement about Biden’s withdrawal, in uncharted waters. In other words, we’re unburdened by what has been — including the by-now-badly-outdated vision of what presidential-level drama might look like. Shows like “Veep” and “House of Cards” exist in the context of “24,” with its endlessly swapped-out presidents, and of “The West Wing”: The more cynical and more recent programs seem like a jaded response to the Aaron Sorkin-created NBC drama about the idealists who saved America every week from 1999 to 2006. The day Biden announced his decision, the New York Times published a piece by Sorkin in which he imagined the Democrats, in a show of what Sorkin cast as statesmanlike magnanimity, nominating the Republican Mitt Romney at their convention, in order to save the republic, or something like that.
Real life doesn’t work like that. It works a little more like “House of Cards,” the plot twists of which often felt like random happenstance, even as a singular guiding intelligence, that of the show’s central character, made it all happen. (Thrumming in the backbeat of coverage of Biden’s decision in particular is the sense that Nancy Pelosi’s version of “House of Cards” would be far more interesting.) But the fact of the matter is that political drama, as a genre, was already on its way out, and now couldn’t feel less relevant. Nothing a writer could invent stands up to the shocking, strange, can’t-look-away quality of 2024 reality.
And it’s only July.
