Some years, the specter of Donald Trump looms more overtly over the Emmys than others. In 2017, during his first year in office, the speeches and comedy bits were Trump-obsessed, and it was hard to see the big winner of the night, Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale, as anything but a cautionary tale about what his administration might bring. But Season 1 of Handmaid’s Tale was largely completed before Trump took office and based, of course, on even older source material. So 2020 is actually the year TV started grappling, fully, with this president’s legacy. It’s deep in the groundwater of the night’s big winners: Schitt’s Creek, Watchmen, and Succession. Those three shows will forever serve as a perfect distillation of what it was like to live in Trump’s America.
Until Jesse Armstrong’s “un-thank-you” riff, the speeches and comedic bits in the Jimmy Kimmel—hosted show weren’t particularly Trumpian, probably because there was plenty of Covid-based humor to go around. Maybe that’s a good thing. Remember Sean Spicer’s 2017 cameo? And in truth, the networks’ proclaimed efforts to react directly to Trump’s win with their programming hasn’t panned out particularly well for them. ABC declared it would play to the “silent majority” with a Roseanne revival—which was forced to overhaul itself as less incendiary The Connors when Roseanne Barr was fired from the show amidst scandal. Pandering to a fired-up left didn’t work out for CBS when the Murphy Brown revival, which pitted Candice Bergen’s fictional news anchor against Trump, was cancelled after just one season.
You could probably make an argument that any wildly popular and critically acclaimed show will reflect the times we live in. There’s certainly been plenty made of the way the Trump lens refracts through Emmy favorites and Obama-era holdovers Veep and Game of Thrones. And the 2019 success of Ava Duvernay’s Central Park Five can’t help but be seen as in conversation with Trump. But other recent favorites like Big Little Lies, Mrs. Maisel, Fleabag, and even Modern Family never seemed all that directly in dialogue with the way we live now.
Succession and Watchmen, however, were shows created in the Trumpian soup and reflect two different ways our nation has reacted to the new normal. As for the former, there’s a reason the palace intrigue of the White House and it’s many morally bankrupt occupants makes for such delicious click-worthy news. Loath as we may be to admit it, there’s something irresistible about these very powerful and backstabbing rich folks behaving badly and, best of all, getting in their own way. It seems telling that Jeremy Strong—who plays the most self-destructive of the Roy siblings—was the only Succession actor to pick up a win.
