As both a politics and pop culture nerd, I often think about how the two realms overlap.
For example, Arrested Development to me is the TV show that best represents the George W. Bush years – post 9/11 jitters, WMDs and Iraq, Katrina, and all the rest of it embodied by elite incompetence played out as delightful farce.
And then for the Obama administration, while Parks and Recreation is a worthy candidate, I lean toward Key & Peele as its best exemplar. There’s Luther, Obama’s anger translator, of course, but all told it frames a more progressive era that was open to investigating thorny issues of race and inequality via deeply hilarious satire.
For the deepest of glorious deep dives, check out all 351 Key & Peele sketches ranked.
Skipping over the guy sometimes referred to as TFG for a moment, that brings us to Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.
You remember Joe, right?
Amtrak Joe, Ridin’ With Biden, all of that. Wait, what do you mean, you don’t?
Okay, yep, I get it – in the dark haze of Trump 2.0 we’re all currently enduring, it’s easy to forget that strange pocket of time during which Joe Biden was indeed the 46th President of the United States.
While there was no single defining TV show during the strange interregnum between Trump administrations, there are several prominent themes that we can pull from TV circa 2021 to 2024.
Succession
Succession’s first two seasons aired during the Trump 1.0 era, while its final two landed during the Biden years. But all told, it best represents the feeling and vibe of those years, which dovetailed too, lest we forget, with the freaky and surreal initial waves of the COVID pandemic.
Importantly, the final seasons of Succession involve a presidential election that has its own messy outcome.* But what we see from inside the show is how the most powerful interests operate above a level of scrutiny and with a shocking level of amorality. Ideology isn’t even important, except for a mindless worship for power and the almighty dollar.
* “What It Takes,” from Season 3, might be the best TV episode focused on how politics “really works” I’ve ever seen.
Succession is also a brilliant dark satire, so there are deep riches of comedy and compelling storytelling to help the medicine go down.
Succession also reminds us of a time in which the prevailing wisdom was that Donald Trump had “somehow lucked” his way into the White House in 2016. This ties to the Biden years as uneasy respite ahead of an uncertain future.
That the barbarians were still very much at the gates. Waiting and watching for their opportunity to get back in.
Where this time they may change the rules and the temperature enough so they never let go of the levers of power again.
Trauma and navigating the unrecognizable present
Underneath the hood of the unmoored political situation – punctuated by the gut punch of an attempted insurrection at the Capitol days before Biden took office – and the societal ground shift in the wake of COVID was a profound psychic wound on a national level.
There’s a reason that Tiger King was the first buzzy show after COVID struck – it’s stupid and surreal and sad and funny in a bizarre way that vibes with that time.
And for the Biden era as a whole, there are two shows I’d point to that best represent the profound sense of dealing with an existential trauma while navigating a present that makes a lot less sense than it used to back when things were “normal.”
Digging back into pop culture and the past for a moment, a line from Mad Men’s Roger Sterling calls out here, as the world of the late 1960s feels increasingly chaotic to him: “When is everything going to get back to normal?”
Both shows fittingly deal in a sense with the aftermath of pandemic: Station Eleven and the first season of The Last of Us. Station Eleven becomes a profound meditation on survival and even thriving in the aftermath of apocalypse, while The Last of Us – a prestige zombie show if there ever was one – forces its characters to navigate extreme threats both from without and within while trying to hold on to some sense of humanity and even decency.
In a way, maybe both shows served as preparation for what was coming in the real world.
Late-stage capitalism absurdism (or: trauma processing as comedy?)
Succession certainly fits into this category, but I’ll point to a trio of shows that lean even more heavily into satire and surrealism as a means of pointing to how absurd and even disturbing life in the United States has become for many.
In The White Lotus, the ultra-wealthy are depicted as self-absorbed and often miserable amid a backdrop of obscene luxury and natural beauty (oh, and don’t forget the delicious murder mystery per season to boot). Whereas The Bear becomes an analogy for capitalism and the American Dream – that is, it’s a mad scramble for validation, fulfillment, and wealth that literally never ends.
And then The Rehearsal, one of the most unusual shows in all of television history, tests out Nathan Fielder’s devilishly bizarre hypothesis that maybe everything could be okay in our lives if we were only able to rehearse every aspect of them enough to the point where they become entirely predictable.
Scam culture meets hustle theater
It’s wild that in the narrow span of February and March 2022, four limited series premiered, all focused on striving entrepreneurs who either pushed the legal line hard in getting theirs or were out and out worldclass scam-meets-bullshit artists.
Of the four, The Dropout is by far the best, featuring an outstanding performance from Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced and currently imprisoned founder of biotech company Theranos. It’s a masterclass in showcasing what happens when ambition and delusion become weaponized, aided by investors and sycophants who become deluded out of self-interest and self-protection.
Inventing Anna is an amusing examination of the rise and fall of a woman who posed as Anna Delvey (played by Julia Garner), a pretentious long con woman with an oddball accent that was lampooned on Saturday Night Live (you are veh-wey veh-wey fat).
WeCrashed and SuperPumped meanwhile are more straight-ahead studies of founders (Adam Neumann of WeWork and Travis Kalanick of Uber, respectively) who had no compunction of playing fast and loose with legality and morality while hustle bro-ing their start-ups into what we now refer to as unicorn companies.
What’s disturbing about all of these shows, looking back, is that they highlight behavior that is openly rewarded by our current government.
Only if you look the right way or have the connections, of course.
Finally, don’t forget to check out the newly updated best 100 TV shows ever.