Alex Mohajer on The Comey Rule and the Trump Stories He Wants to See Dramatized
In this episode I'm joined by journalist Alex Mohajer, and we’ll be talking about how art should represent and engage with the Trump Administration. How do we feel about the film and TV that has been produced in response to the last four years? And what should be the best approaches going forward to document this uniquely turbulent and corrupt White House across future comedies, dramas, and other genres of art? In particular we’re going to look at The Comey Rule, Showtime’s new miniseries about former FBI Director James Comey’s impact on the 2016 election. The show, written and directed by Billy Ray and starring Jeff Daniels as Comey, is, we both felt, very good, and we’ll look at how its strategies for dramatizing recent current events could serve as a guide for future work looking to retell the myriad stories and controversies of Trump’s presidency.
For those not familiar with Mohajer’s work, he is a political writer, commentator, and activist whose coverage of the 2016 election and its aftermath made him one of the most shared contributors at HuffPost. He has been interviewed for or featured on The Fox News Channel, PolitiFact, Washington Post, LA and NY Times, Yahoo News, New York Public Radio, and many other outlets, and in 2018 he received the Excellence in Journalism Award for Excellence in Feature Writing from the National Association of LGBTQ Journalists. He is currently the Public and Media Relations Director of the Stonewall Democratic Club, and he hosts the livestreaming news show The AM Report for Happs. He’s been on the frontlines of covering the events depicted in the The Comey Rule, so after watching it for myself, I knew I wanted to hear his take, too. In addition to that show we’ll also discuss what other Trump-era film and TV has resonated with us, what other events we want to see get dramatized, and how comedies can approach an administration that often seems beyond parody.
You can watch The AM Report and follow Alex at
Happs.tv/@alexmohajer