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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Thursday, March 28, 2024

'The Circus' is great entertainment, and that's part of the problem

debate
Candidates for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination appear on stage at the Fox News Republican Debate on August 6, 2015.

In 1985, the academic Neil Postman published “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” a scathing polemic on how modern media has degraded public discourse by reducing everything — politics, religion, education and journalism — to entertainment. His dire warnings, which might once have seemed alarmist in a pre-Internet era, now ring eerily prophetic, especially in the realm of politics. Case in point: the fact that reality TV star and real estate mogul Donald Trump, a man whose only qualification for the U.S. presidency is his skill as a brander, is now one of the leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination. One can only speculate whether Postman, who passed away in 2003, would feel vindicated or horrified. Probably a little bit of both.

It would be harder to guess what he’d make of “The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth” (2016), a new documentary series about the 2016 presidential race produced by Showtime in partnership with Bloomberg Media. The series keeps its distance from the kind of breathless media coverage that has characterized the campaign so far, even as it perpetuates the kind of politics-as-entertainment that Postman so presciently denounced over 30 years ago. The show, hosted by political strategist Mark McKinnon and “All Due Respect” co-anchors John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, winks at the absurdity of the whole spectacle in its title; the question of whether it refers to the political circus or the media circus is kept ambiguous. Although it never questions and perhaps cynically ignores whether the spectacle itself is inherently problematic. The documentary series occupies the roles of both detached observer and willing participant.



Still, if you can shake off all that epistemological angst, its a pretty fun watch. Each half-hour episode (the season is now four episodes in) centers on a different aspect of the 2016 campaign: the surprising surge of “outsider” candidates on both sides, the crowded establishment lane on the Republican side and the “prisoner’s dilemma” it poses for each of the candidates, the contentiousness of the Iowa caucuses and the importance of political momentum going into the New Hampshire primary. Heilemann, Halperin and McKinnon prove to be deft guides through this thorny and oftentimes baffling terrain, prefacing each episode with their insights on the shape of the race before hitting the ground. As veterans of the presidential campaign circuit and political journalism overall, Heilemann and Halperin know the game inside and out. They are also pretty chummy with a few of the major candidates, so they enjoy enviable access, and the show captures plenty of interactions between the hosts and the candidates, from the brief exchanges between town hall events to the more extensive sit-down interviews.

If there’s any reason to check out “The Circus,” its for these kinds of moments. Because the campaign season seems to stretch on indefinitely, the media is so focused on constructing artificial narratives, we’re so accustomed to the candidates speaking in canned platitudes (with the notable exception of Trump) and partisanship often lumps ideological opponents into groups and strips them of their individuality, it’s easy to forget that the people vying for the highest office in the land are just that: people. They’re subject to the same laws of gravity, political and Newtonian, as the rest of us. And around Heilemann and Halperin, they seem looser and more at ease. Bernie Sanders reveals he has a dry, acerbic wit. Marco Rubio admits to an obsession with Eazy-E. Ted Cruz does an impression of Homer Simpson scarfing down donuts. Away from the harsh glare of media scrutiny, they’re just regular folks.

But regular, at least in this absurd election cycle, is a relative term, and “The Circus” is acutely aware of that. In the first episode of the series, Mark Halperin offers this fairly vanilla assessment of the race thus far: “Every election’s crazy. This one’s already been crazier than almost any one I’ve ever covered.” That’s a contender for Understatement of the Year. Now let’s just hope it doesn’t decide to run for president.

Summary True to its title, "The Circus" lays bare the sheer absurdity of the 2016 presidential race, but fails to probe its underpinnings adequately.
4 Stars