CUE THE WORLD’S SMALLEST VIOLIN, PLEASE. TV writers: ‘Catastrophic’ Trump is making our jobs harder:
A panel at the ATX Television Festival in Austin, Texas, on Friday, titled “Trumped Up TV,” was assembled to analyze the impact of the president on the industry. The consensus of the group is that Trump has been rather distracting, to say the least.
“How can I possibly focus?” said Javier Grillo-Marxuach (Lost). “There’s a lot of stress eating involved … more than anything else, the torrent of news and information is about the stuff you do to mitigate your stress to be effective.”
Royal Pains producer Michael Rauch agreed, noting he has a rule that no computers or cell phones are allowed in his writers’ room while the team is working. But the moment there’s a break “the next hour all we’re talking about is how horrendous and depressing it is, then we’re back to work trying to be funny.”
The Vampire Diaries showrunner Julie Plec said the election brought about “absolute sorrow, horror, depression” behind the scenes of the show. Plec noted that she feels a responsibility to “double down on making it okay to be inclusive and not okay to be a bigot” in her storytelling given the current culture.
Whatever they think about Trump, they think about his voters, in spades. But it’s awfully rich to see Hollywood pretending that Trump is some sort of new and strange alien intruder, when this is exactly how Hollywood acted from November of 2000 through January of 2009, and based on what Todd Gitlin wrote (not to mention his tone as a fellow lefty) in his 1983 history of network TV in the 1970s and early 1980s titled Inside Prime Time, during at least the first years of the Reagan administration.
That last quote from Plec on inclusivity is especially adorable, given that, as Roger Simon wrote in his autobiography, originally titled Blacklisting Myself, the surest way for a writer to lose his job in “inclusive,” “non-bigoted” Hollywood is blacklist himself by pushing back against the knee jerk Republican bashing by the head of the writers’ room.