“The air of impossibility has been removed”: Realist Political Drama(dy) and the Trope of Becoming President

Abstract

Over the past ten to fifteen years, film and TV culture have offered new and more complex negotiations of presidential politics through depictions of fictional American presidents. While in the past American popular culture celebrated the president as overwhelmingly positive, larger-than-life figure, recent representations have introduced more complex characters who face, or even trigger, complicated and morally ambiguous conflicts. This article investigates how The West Wing, House of Cards and Veep, three political TV shows, make use of the emerging trope of a brokered nomination convention in order to question one-dimensional fictional representations of the American president and presidential politics.