Review: Our Cartoon President “Debate Prep”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

With the election just over a month away, both parties try to class up their candidates to be presentable to the American people, with Mitch McConnell trying to make Trump less of a slob and Jill Biden trying to have Joe think about his words before he says them. Wow, this really IS a cartoon.

OUR TAKE

Our Cartoon President continues to pull from the headlines and make light of the ongoing circus act that is American politics, though it ironically makes my anxiety about the upcoming election worse than it would watching another Showtime political show actually called The Circus, which is just actually footage of the real political coverage going on right now. I feel like any other administration in our nation’s history would actually been helped by having a show like this simplify the goings on like this, but when things in the real world truly feel like we’re truly fucked, possibly for multiple decades to come, it’s a little hard to feel the laughs coming from a parody of the situation like this.

Cartoon Trump continues to be a total subhuman who cannot fathom normal person behavior, which is what they try to work with this episode as something to work on, but obviously they can’t set up a future development to an election they can’t predict the results of, so we can’t say for sure if this will bring him down in this series or not. It also seems like the writing team really did not want to let go of Kellyanne Conway, since they keep bringing her back despite her leaving the White House some time ago. Biden, now the main character on the Democratic side, keeps finding more ways to simply be really dumb and have Barack and his wife Jill, now a more recurring character, trying to correct that, but then having it undone because the status quo needs to be preserved until the election.

All the while, I can’t help but notice what ISN’T being covered here, or at least not to any major extent. The matter with the Supreme Court is only given a few minutes of attention, with the total hypocrisy of rushing through a candidate being more sad than funny, at least from my perspective, which just increases this disconnect between what we seem to be supposed to be feeling about these jokes and how they actually feel, which is as an oversimplification of rather scary things. This show was simply not equipped to really dive into the nuances of the real world as they got more serious, but if things keep going as they seem to be, it could get at least four more seasons to figure itself out in that regard. Though I really hope not.