According to Deadline, Mary Elizabeth Winstead will star in CBS’ BrainDead, an upcoming straight-to-series project from The Good Wife creators Robert and Michelle King. As previously reported, the premise of the comedy/horror/political thriller posits that Capitol Hill has been shut down because aliens have eaten the brains of our elected officials and their staff. That’s a pretty good joke, until you start thinking about the actual government shutdown, and wish that extraterrestrial cranial snackers were involved instead of a hissy fit over Planned Parenthood.
Winstead has previous experience dealing with threats to D.C. as Mary Todd Lincoln in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. In BrainDead, she’ll be called upon to help her brother, the Senate Majority Whip, only to uncover a growing contingent of cerebrum-deprived legislators. As an aspiring documentary filmmaker, she’ll be perfectly suited to recognize this calamity, while lacking the aptitude to convey this information in a format that the public will ever see, much less care about. Winstead could easily spend the entire series exposing this congressional menace, only to discover during the finale that the news media and American public have also had their brains devoured. That would also make a fine segue for Winstead’s spinoff sitcom, I Moved To Canada!
This absurd premise of a lobotomized US political system will play out when BrainDead airs next summer, presumably right after GOP delegates decide if they are going to endorse the former host of NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice as their nominee for President of the United States.