Get ready: Stephen Colbert is making an animated comedy about the Trumps
Source: Washington Post
For the past couple months, I’ve been covering President Trump and his family as if they were players in a fictional television show. After all, the events of the last year or two have made lots of us feel as if we’re living in fiction, and badly written fiction at that. And things are about to get even more meta: Showtime announced on Thursday that it has ordered 10 episodes of an animated series about President Trump and his family, with Stephen Colbert — who himself played a fictional character who shared his name as the host of “The Colbert Report” — and Chris Licht as the executive producers.
The goal of the series is to provide “insights into what makes them so definitively Trumpian,” though given that Showtime is describing the show as “a character study in search of character” — the implication being that Trump doesn’t have any — that may be difficult. I would never dream of telling Colbert how to do comedy. But for the show — which will be produced on a short turnaround to keep up with current events — to truly get at the absurd drama that surrounds us, I hope Colbert and his colleagues keep a couple of things in mind:
1. Trump and the people in his orbit take their cues from the media, whether it’s reality television, “Fox & Friends” or anti-hero dramas: As a result, any series that tries to get at the truth of Trumpworld needs to be as much a commentary on media as on the Trumps themselves. It’s possible that a true, real, secret “Donald Trump” lies buried behind all the personas that Trump has adopted over the years. But it’s much more plausible that he’s what philosopher Jean Baudrillard would call a simulacrum: Trump has tried to be so many things over the years that his performance has essentially eclipsed any real persona he had, if it even existed in the first place. So rather than trying to psychoanalyze Trump, use him as a vehicle to comment on the media he resembles. Is he Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), believing everyone laughs at his jokes because he’s actually funny, or Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese), ranting at the world and unaware of his own inefficacy? How about a Trump family game of musical chairs to determine who is who in “The Godfather”? What would an episode of the “Real Housewives of Mar-a-Lago” look like? The best way to answer questions about Trump may be to explore pop culture and the news.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2017/07/28/get-ready-stephen-colbert-is-making-an-animated-comedy-about-the-trumps/?utm_term=.4a4c325b85f2
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