TV Captured Trump by Looking Away

Read: The visceral, woman-centric horror of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

Another early show to adroitly reflect the period was Orange Is the New Black. The series first debuted before Trump’s presidency but, throughout his term in office, focused on the fundamental imbalance of power in America via the lens of the carceral system. Orange began as a comedy; it ended as a gutting exposé of how stacked and inhumane the justice and immigration systems can be. The fifth season, released in the summer of 2017, saw the women of Litchfield prison riot in response to an inmate’s death at the hands of a guard. Initially, the rebellion was cathartic. But Orange was never an idealistic show, and the women’s display of power couldn’t end well.

Now I can’t help thinking about Orange in tandem with another Netflix series that came out later in 2017, Marvel’s The Punisher. The show has received new attention since the Trump-incited Capitol riot earlier this month, during which men with zip ties and Punisher motifs on their body armor seemed to be seeking out politicians—the bad guys in their mind—because they’d bought into the lie that they were being disenfranchised. At the time of its debut, the series, starring Jon Bernthal as the veteran and gun-toting vigilante Frank Castle, didn’t seem to offer much insight into politics, even though it was an uneasy release, given the mass shootings that had occurred throughout the year. Castle’s extralegal activities are justified in the comics and on the show because he kills only bad guys. But what constitutes a bad guy, it turns out, is more complicated outside the realm of comics. On Season 5 of Orange, female prisoners rioted against cruelty and inhumane conditions and the system crushed them further in return. Both series depicted a rotten setup, but only one heroized a character who took the law into his own hands.

THE PARABLES

The more writers and showrunners sensed that Trump himself was an impossible subject, the more they looked instead to the landscape that fostered him: the ascendance of anti-elitism, the absurdity of jingoism-as-exceptionalism, the legacy of American racism. Some of these takes worked better than others.

A month or so before Q Clearance Patriot began posting cryptic messages about celebrities sex-trafficking children on 4chan, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk debuted American Horror Story: Cult. The FX series was a hastily rewritten addition to the AHS franchise starring Evan Peters as Kai, a Trump fan leading a murderous cult whose ultimate goal was … getting elected to city council? AHS: Cult was nonsensical and gruesome and apparently unfamiliar with the motivations of human beings. But it was the first TV show to tap into the idea of a Trumpian cult, and probe the fealty of its devotees. Space Force, a shaky satire pegged to Trump’s creation of a galactic branch of the U.S. military, was a show solely about the funniness of American idiocy, an uneasy subject during a deadly pandemic. Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? gave a bothsidesish and caustic treatment to ludicrous excess on the left and the right, although in its more perspicacious moments, it revealed how hatred can be a passive thing rather than an active one—how simply going along with something despicable, or even just declining to object, enables atrocities.