In the probably fruitless quest to describe just how horrible it is that Donald Trump will soon be president, satirists have scoured the canon from surrealism all the way to Batman looking for apt comparisons. Now Damien Love, a television critic for Scotland’s the Herald, has thrown his hat into the ring with a TV highlights column for the ages. Love listed the BBC One’s coverage of the Trump administration as though it were a long-awaited reboot of The Twilight Zone. An image of Love’s description of the inauguration quickly went viral on social media.
Love describes the “gaudy” ceremony as the controversial premiere of a four-year augmented reality show set in a horrific dystopia in which Trump has somehow become president. Here’s his complete listing:
President Trump: The Inauguration
4pm, BBC One/ STV
After a long absence, The Twilight Zone returns with one of the most ambitious, expensive and controversial productions in broadcast history. Sci-fi writers have dabbled often with alternative history stories—among the most common is the “What If The Nazis Had Won The Second World War” setting—but this huge interactive virtual reality project, which will unfold on TV, in the press, and on Twitter over the next four years, sets out to build an ongoing alternative present. The story begins in a nightmarish version of 2017 in which huge sections of the US electorate have somehow been duped into voting to make Donald Trump president. It sounds far-fetched, and it is, but as it goes on it becomes more and more chillingly plausible. Today’s feature-length opener concentrates on the gaudy inauguration of President Trump, and the stirrings of protest and despair surrounding the ceremony, while pundits speculate gravely on what lies ahead. It’s a flawed piece, but a disturbing glimpse of the horrors we could stumble into, if we’re not careful.
It would be nice to think that at some point the real purpose of Trump’s election will be revealed to be some kind of promotion—for something other than Exxon and the Trump Organization, that is—but if this is a Twilight Zone episode, Trump’s inauguration is clearly the final twist, not the show opener. So maybe the best use of our time in these last few days is throwing money at NASA to see if they can track down the cursed monkey’s paw that’s surely to blame for all this.
