There really is no such thing as “too soon” anymore, apparently. Need proof? HBO Films has greenlighted a miniseries about the 2016 presidential election, an event you are already very familiar with, because, unless you were born sometime in the last four months, you literally just lived through it. (And if you were born in the last four months, please stop reading blogs and go back to developing your neck strength.)
The new HBO miniseries will reunite some of the talent who worked on the 2012 TV movie Game Change, a chronicle of the 2008 United States presidential election campaign with a special emphasis on John McCain (played by Ed Harris) and his unusual running mate, Sarah Palin (Julianne Moore). That film was based on the book Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, the first installment in what would become a series by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann about each election.
Now we will be presented with a fictionalized, scripted version of “Donald Trump’s dramatic, improbable victory over Hillary Clinton” (as if we had forgotten), which will itself be based on the next, yet-to-be published book from those same Game Change authors. Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman, and Jay Roach are producing, with Roach also directing.
HBO’s series shouldn’t be confused with Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story take on the election, which will use the Trump-Clinton battle as a premise for the show’s nightmarish Season 7. Showrunners aren’t waiting for the election to even fade from memory before they force us to relive it, but we may as well accept this as the new normal, because the lines between fiction and reality have blurred so far that it’s impossible to tell which is which anymore.
At least we have until 2018 to see what HBO comes up with. Hey, maybe by then our memories will actually need refreshing.
