If you turned on the television earlier this year, you may have tuned in to watch Sterling K. Brown fighting to save what he thought was left of his country from the selfish interests of a power hungry billionaire in Hulu’s Paradise.
Perhaps, before today’s Independence Day, you also caught Zero Day, in which Robert De Niro plays a former president leading an investigation into a devastating nationwide cyberattack, ultimately uncovering a conspiracy against the American people involving key leaders from across the political spectrum. A few months before that, in October, the second season of The Diplomat saw Keri Russell’s Kate Wyler continue digging into the bombing of a British aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf — only this time she was bogged down by the arrival of Allison Janney’s Vice President Grace Penn, who was vying for the presidency as she sensed that the current Commander in Chief (an old white guy) was becoming increasingly ineffectual.
These political thrillers (and more) have been some of the most popular fare on television as of late, and many of them have reflected the increasingly strained political environment in the United States as the country turns 249 years old.
Some have gone so far as to seem downright prophetic in contending with certain themes related to fracturing electorates and increasing skepticism toward those in power against the backdrop of President Donald Trump‘s first 100 days in office.
“I’ve always been interested in looking at what America’s role is in the world, and the gap between what we want it to be and what it actually is, and what we think the outcome of our actions will be and what they are,” The Diplomat creator Debora Cahn told Deadline a few months ago. “So it’s been interesting watching all these political thrillers come out, given the fact that there’s been such a big pivot recently in foreign policy, and knowing that all of these were made before that happened, they look a little bit more like documentaries than they did before.”
The Diplomat. Allison Janney as Grace Penn in episode 206 of The Diplomat. Cr. Alex Bailey/Netflix © 2024
When Art Imitates Life
Audiences typically turn to scripted television for an escape from reality. Yet, the influence that the real world has on all art is virtually inescapable. Cahn isn’t clairvoyant. When filming The Diplomat Season 2, she had no idea that just months before the 2024 election former President Joe Biden would give up his aspirations of a second term and then-Vice President Kamala Harris would lead the Democrat ticket instead.
Neither is Eric Newman, creator of Zero Day, whose Netflix series depicts exactly the kind of chaos that can ensue when people don’t trust their government to do right by them. Or Dan Fogelman, who had been ruminating on the idea for Paradise for an entire decade before it came out a mere month into Trump’s second term.
In fact, Fogelman tells Deadline he remembers a sense of “strained credulity” while writing Julianne Nicholson’s Sinatra as a power broker in the private sector with such direct access not only to the President of the United States but to the actual machinations of the federal government. It’s eery, then, that Paradise premiered against wall-to-wall news coverage of Elon Musk’s exploits in the Oval Office as his DOGE team made massive cuts to crucial government agencies.
“We’ve been struck by the irony and the coincidence of a lot of the things we’ve been writing about starting to come true in front of our faces,” he said back in March. “I think it’s just in the air right now. I’m sure if gazillions of television shows were written during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a lot of writers would’ve had hellscape nuclear war scenarios on their minds at that particular time.”
It’s true, historically, the way that the U.S. government is depicted across film and television is often a reflection of the prevailing sentiments among both creatives and audiences at that time.
However, this current string of civil discourse in media has departed significantly in tone from the last wave of iconic political commentary in film and television.
American Exceptionalism in Film & TV
Just under two months after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Fox premiered 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland as counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer. The 204-episode, nine-season series followed Jack Bauer on countless missions to fight any person or system that posed an external threat to the U.S.
The series premiered at a time of exceptional American nationalism. As U.S. forces began to wage the War on Terror, the overwhelming sentiment on the home front was one of patriotism and unity. The message was clear: The enemy is out there, beyond U.S. borders, and we have to stop them. It’s not a surprise, then, that this was also reflected in popular media.
There’s a scene from Aaron Sorkin’s 2012 drama The Newsroom in which Thomas Sadoski’s Don Keefer informs a United Airlines pilot that U.S. forces have killed Osama bin Laden before it’s been officially reported. It’s hard to imagine such an earnest moment of domestic patriotism in popular media these days — to the point that rewatching this scene now, it feels somewhat suspect — but it’s an honest reflection of the mood in America at the start of the millennia.
Shows like 24 and later, in 2011, Homeland were “a way to sort of reflect reality without being responsible for the facts of reality, so that you saw the problems and the challenges of leadership and of power and of the expression of power, but without being bound by the facts,” creator Howard Gordon mused.
Fox
So what happens when that reality starts to feel stranger than fiction? Well, that’s why Gordon is staying away from political commentary right about now, he jokes.
In all seriousness, he adds, “I think the veil seems to have been lifted on the level of skepticism that’s been raised on institutions. It’s not just our politicians. It’s our scientists. It’s our justice system. We are in a real emotional tangle about what we feel toward those people and those myths and those stories that we tell ourselves.”
“So we’re living in times in which none of us really know where to look, who to listen to, and who to trust,” he continued. “There is a mythology that needs to unify us, a story that we tell ourselves, and when that story is dismantled and made cynical…it’s interesting.”
I Think I’ve Seen This Film Before…And I Didn’t Like The Ending
There is a blueprint for popular media reflecting a distrust of the U.S. government. The 1970s were also a period marked by significant decline in the American public’s trust of its elected officials fueled by the Vietnam War, Watergate, economic instability due to high inflation and high unemployment, and social unrest. Sound familiar?
It’s not by coincidence that this decade also produced some of the best known political thrillers that reflect a sense of paranoia and distrust of authority, including The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, and Three Days of the Condor.
Steve Thompson, creator of Prime Video’s Prime Target, says his series about a young mathematician that becomes embroiled in a government conspiracy was inspired by this genre, which he says illustrates that “something’s wrong with the world, but most of you haven’t noticed.”
“That mood seems to be coming prevalent again. Maybe that is why when I went to Scott Free [and] New Regency and said I wanted to write a conspiracy thriller, maybe that’s why they said yes,” Thompson said. “It was born from my love of a genre, but maybe people are receptive to it because that is a prevalent mood.”
Newman also acknowledged the influence these films have had on his own political commentary. Though he says, while the mood in America might be similar to that of the 1970s, he believes audiences should take a different message away from shows like Zero Day than they did from conspiracy thrillers of decades past.
“What [those films] all sort of had in common was this idea that there is a monolithic, impenetrable system. You might not be aware of it, but it’s there, and it’s guiding us, whether we know or not. And of course, those 70s movies tend to end with the conclusion that you are not as big as the system,” he said. “Obviously, we are in a different era than the 70s, and so we had a different conclusion, and hopefully a more aspirational one, where, despite your inability to discern fact from fiction, you can still do the right thing.”
Newman isn’t alone in trying to instill a sense of hope in his story about the follies of elected leaders.
Cahn, who cut her teeth on shows like The West Wing and Homeland, also says she’s not all that interested in becoming too entangled in the current truths of U.S. politics and instead prefers to contend with what happens when “even if we’re all doing our best with good intentions, we still wind up in bloody quagmires.”
“We’re not trying to portray reality, which has become too cartoonish for television. Right now, I’m more interested in trying to give the audience a window into how the thinking works in this field, and how people’s minds work when they’re trying to face an intractable problem without using an apocalyptic solution,” she said. “I think it can be too easy to just say, ‘because of bad people we have to fight these terrible wars,’ or ‘because of corrupt leaders, the ideals of our country have been flushed down the toilet.’ I’d rather look at a situation where the best people with the best intentions are still dealing with unimaginably complicated scenarios.”
After all, it’s not the 1970s anymore. That’s for sure.
It’s 2025, And Nuance Is Dead
In the age of the internet, two things cannot be true at once. In fact, most people can’t even agree anymore on where the truth lies in the first place.
“We had a number of conversations about America’s relationship with the truth — and not just Americans. I think it’s global,” Newman said of the origins of Zero Day. “[People] have sort of retreated into their own truth bubbles, where you have mutually exclusive facts that have to kind of coexist.”
In Zero Day, De Niro’s George Mullen is an old-school politician who, acting on sensibilities developed during a much different time in American history, expects the American people to willingly surrender some of their civil liberties while his commission investigates the nationwide cyberattack. It goes over with the public about as well as something like the George Bush-era Patriot Act would likely go over in today’s political climate. That is, not well at all.
“What we tried to do in Zero Day is present a need for some change in terms of how we handle things as a country. It’s not even the event itself. It’s how we react to the event and things we’re willing to surrender — our civil liberties, for example. It’s what we did after 9/11, and 9/11, everybody agreed on who did it, for the most part. If that were to happen today, I don’t think people could even agree on who did it, and I think it would be a completely different experience,” Newman added. “You want people to relate to it and get the message, because the message is that we are not seeing the same truth, and it’s very likely that we’re both wrong in certain areas and right in others. Neither party has a monopoly on the truth, and neither party has a monopoly on integrity and doing the right thing.”
But, in an era plagued by a lack of nuance and critical engagement with media, are viewers equipped to take that message away from the show? Or, are they likely to be more fixated on drawing real-life comparisons to the show’s co-conspirators (like Lizzy Caplan’s AOC-like, progressive Congresswoman), as if that means something?
When audiences watch Paradise, are they inspired by a populist story about the strength of individual people to stand against a powerful government entity? Or, are they too distracted with the horrors of Fogelman’s imagined federal response to an apocalyptic scenario? Will viewers listen when Eric Kripke says that The Boys is a direct commentary on Trump and his administration? Or will they simply draw their own conclusions about who the good guy is, creator be damned?
“All of this, I think, has a potentially corrosive effect in terms of feeding our skepticism. It’s our inclination as a society to [feed into] conspiracy theories, which, at the end of the day, seems to be the animating idea behind so many of these shows that presupposes bad actors who have a conscious and concerted plan and a level of influence,” Gordon mused.
In fact, the sense of patriotism and unity imbued in series like Homeland and 24 is the reason he was ever drawn to tell those stories in the first place. Without it, Gordon feels that levying such a heavy dose of skepticism against the government in popular media might actually do more harm than good.
“The audience has ceded its responsibility and has gotten lazy and kind of not interested in engaging in civil discourse or in critical thinking that is necessary for democracy,” he said. “I suppose one is to say that a degradation of the office, fictionally, is reflecting a degradation of the responsibilities of citizenship that we seem to have given up.”
The ramifications of the current political climate will likely not be fully understood for several more decades. Until then, as with many other periods throughout history, both artists and audiences will continue to search for answers in the art they create and consume.
After all, as the viewership numbers for these series have shown, it does make for some great television.
“These are the people — and people is the operative word — who actually have unimaginable power to affect the people on the ground,” Gordon said. “So I think just the fact of animating or dramatizing that power and who wants it, who gets it, what it takes to get it, what it takes to keep it, is just great grist for the drama mill.”
