Review: Our Cartoon President “Coronavirus”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfLpyGc_JCI

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

With the nation in increasing turmoil, Trump tries addressing his numerous scandals. Wait, I should be more specific. The country is overtaken by the Coronavirus so Trump tries to put together demonstrations that he is actually fighting it head on despite doing nothing to really stop it. Meanwhile, Biden is now the Democratic nominee but is split between taking the spotlight like his wife wants or stepping back at Obama’s request.

OUR TAKE

I’m not gonna lie, covering this show, especially right now, is weird. As much as I’m sure making light of recent events in this way is helping SOMEBODY cope with the craziness going on, to me it ends up feeling like they’re cutting out the nuance of actually LIVING in this nonsense for the sake of making a cartoon with characters and situation that work for a television series. I imagine this is what it would be like if, say, we were living in Westeros but somehow still had access to Game of Thrones despite living through even weirder versions of the show’s events. So I find myself a bit at a loss trying to think of these cartoon versions of real life people AS characters and not just improv acts whose motivations could change on a dime depending on real world events because there’s no possible way to plan for writing a story like this.

This is the start of the back nine episode of the season, which took a pause back in March, back in what we know as “The Before Times”. Since then Biden has become the nominee and the country has been completely been enveloped apocalyptic turmoil, so naturally the plotlines have to shift towards things reflecting that. Biden now has to be a central character, meaning his character schticks are going to become more prominent, but I suppose we also have to bring in Kamala more now too, right? At least I assume. And I imagine that we’ll be dealing with Coronavirus for the rest of the season despite that barely being a factor in the first half. So I guess this show is kind of like doing that 2016 season of South Park but only focusing on the politics part and then doing (at least) three of those. Or I guess a longer version of “Lil’ Bush” with a higher budget.

Plus, with these being the last batch of episodes until the election, we could very well be seeing the last episodes of the series if Trump does in fact lose (god I hope I didn’t just jinx that). But then if he wins, do they keep the show going another four seasons? Or do they try continuing it anyway with Biden, who is voiced by the same actor as Trump anyway (not sure if that’s meant to be commentary or not)? Whatever they go with in the coming weeks, I’m sure there will be plenty to discuss, but I just wanted to point out that this whole situation is weird, though not as weird as living in what it’s based on.