Burnouts who think they’re literary like to quote Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, but the real HST-heads know that Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail ‘72 is where it’s at. American electoral politics and the people who cover them live in an endlessly fascinating, profoundly weird world populated with hard-drinking cynics and dead-eyed sycophants, and Hunter S. Thompson was the perfect person to document it.
All of which is meant to serve as a recommended alternative, should the collaboration between Fox News’ Megyn Kelly and Fifty Shades Of Grey producer Michael De Luca turns out the way we suspect it might. Not that we’ve got any particular grudge against Kelly; her willingness to stand up to Donald Trump’s schoolyard bullying was admirable, even if, from a purely practical perspective, she did get her name said many times on media outlets besides Fox News out of the deal.
No, it’s simply that the new series they’re co-producing, Embeds, which Variety describes as the adventures of five young reporters who get in “way over their heads” while having “raucous adventures in an unexpected world of sex, drugs, and swing states” amid cameos from “big-name politicians” sounds more like a political version of Cameron Crowe’s Roadies than any sort of pointed satire. In fact, it’s explicitly designed to appeal to a relatively apolitical audience, focusing more on the interpersonal relationships between the reporters than the events they’re reporting on. (Maybe more of a political Grey’s Anatomy, then?)
Embeds was co-created by Scott Conroy and Peter Hamby, who both have credits both traditional (the book Sarah From Alaska, CNN) and nontraditional (Vice, Snapchat) on their political reporting resumes. The series is set to appear on Verizon’s thus-far tepid attempt to break into the streaming-service market, Go90, and the first of six half-hour episodes is expected to debut by Election Day.