A decade or so ago, the hottest trend in television was to imagine what it would be like if politics became unimaginably chaotic. From the deadly underhandedness of the Fitzgerald Grant administration in “Scandal” to the deception that allowed Frank Underwood to climb the federal government like a ladder in “House of Cards” to the sudden twists and turns that befell Selina Meyer in “Vice,” television was a launching pad for a feverish national imagination. Writers dreamed of a world that looked different from our own, one in which the competent, technocratic Obama administration found itself, after the first midterm elections, floundering in a dead end. Real-world politics wasn’t exactly bleak, but it lacked the element of surprise.
As Kamala Harris prepares to become the next Democratic presidential nominee, after Joe Biden announced Sunday that he will not run again, the comparison to those days couldn’t be starker: What a difference 10 years makes. There seems little need to dramatize the political chaos, since no one can write the script for the past three and a half weeks of American life. That’s not to minimize the very real consequences of the November election, whatever its course, or, to take just one example, the potential life-and-death consequences of an attack on Donald Trump’s life.
But — before Labor Day, arguably the day when most regular, offline people (whoever they are) are watching the election — we’ve already seen a would-be assassin try to kill Trump, putting a temporary halt to the ultimately successful effort to persuade the incumbent to drop his reelection bid. As no one needs reminding, this pressure campaign was sparked by Biden’s historically poor debate performance on June 27 — which also lacked precedent, given that it occurred in a debate between two men who had not yet been formally nominated by their party. It was one of the most consequential telecasts of the century so far; it was also another spectacle squeezed into a season that was already full of them.
Trying to understand political developments in 2024 through the lens of what was and is on television would be too easy: In other words, everything that has happened so far this year exists in the context of everything we are living and what has come before us. But Donald Trump, emerging from the morass of American culture’s darkest and most bizarre impulses in 2016, was not just a candidate, then president, then candidate again; he was a guarantee that as long as he continued to seek the Oval Office, politics would grant Hollywood’s wish as if it had been granted on a monkey’s paw. Presidential elections would never be boring again.
The 2016 election—“Access Hollywood” tape and all—and the 2020 election—held largely remotely in the midst of a pandemic and a national uprising—need no retelling. But the 2024 election somehow trumps them both, with a series of events so new and so bizarre that the news has begun to take on a lopsided texture. Almost anything seemed possible long before Biden announced his decision not to run for reelection after all: As a result, the shock factor in that announcement has been somewhat drained. What other pivotal point in American history has there been when so much has piled up by now?
What has changed since House of Cards, Scandal, and Vice President is the fact that the chaos of the federal government is now a daily fact of American life; that the past month or so has taken place inside a presidency that promised to return American politics to a more familiar place, and has, for a time, succeeded in returning American politics to a more familiar place, is among the ultimately sad ironies of the Biden presidency. In Vice President, for example, Selina Meyer’s political fortunes as a blunder-prone, brutally disempowered vice president—who eventually becomes president briefly after her boss falls ill, and then has to quickly reintroduce herself to America—seem ludicrously implausible, a ridiculous frame on which to hang some jokes. Taken in its broadest outline, Harris’s 2024 thus far looks not unlike Meyer’s 2010s. But the whole point of “Vice President” was to push the American political system to its limits in order to explore Meyer’s own psychology. Real life doesn’t care as much about character development. And this character doesn’t solve that problem as thoroughly.
The coming months hold promise for those inclined to sympathize with the Democratic cause; they also hold considerable danger, simply because, as former President Barack Obama said in his statement on Biden’s withdrawal, we are treading uncharted waters. In other words, we are unencumbered by what has happened in the past—including a now-outdated vision of what presidential drama might look like. Shows like “Veep” and “House of Cards” are in the vein of “24,” with its endlessly switching bosses, and “The West Wing”: the more pessimistic, more recent shows feel like a tired response to the drama Aaron Sorkin created on NBC about the idealists who saved America every week from 1999 to 2006. The day Biden announced his decision, the New York Times published an op-ed by Sorkin in which he imagined Democrats, in a display of what Sorkin called statesmanlike courage, nominating Republican Mitt Romney at their convention, in order to save the republic, or something.
Real life doesn’t work that way. It works more like House of Cards, where plot twists seem like random coincidences, even as there is a singular guiding intelligence, that of the show’s main character, that makes it all happen. (In the media coverage of Biden’s decision in particular, there’s a sense that a Nancy Pelosi-style House of Cards would be more interesting.) But the fact of the matter is that political drama, as a genre, was already on its way out, and now it can’t feel less relevant. Nothing a writer can invent can match the shocking, unmissable quality of reality in 2024.
And now it's only July.
