NBC might not actually make its Hillary Clinton miniseries now that Republicans are mad
During the TCAs, NBC announced that it was planning a Diane Lane-starring miniseries on the career of Hillary Clinton from 1998 to present, tracing her life as “a wife, politician, and cabinet member” and, eventually, proclaiming her the new President on the television and therefore in real life. Understandably, the Republican National Committee balked at this announcement, believing that, no, America’s presidents should continue to be decided by free, democratic elections that have been made as difficult as possible for certain segments of society to participate in, and should certainly not be subject to the influence of popular networks who exert powerful control over their impressionable, easily riled following, like NBC.
So in response, it voted to ban NBC from all 2016 primary debates on the basis of its presumed bias—perhaps believing that, should Hillary Clinton actually decide to run, NBC might replace her at the debates with a superimposed Diane Lane. Obviously, this would be unfair to all the other candidates who don’t look like Diane Lane, and whose life’s struggles have not been made into empathetic TV drama.
But now it seems the miniseries that might not actually be all that glowing, about the candidate who might not actually run, might not actually get made: Fox Television pulled out of producing the four-hour special—a decision it said was purely financial, and certainly had nothing to do with political pressure, and definitely not Fox News’ close association with conservatives. So now, inevitably, NBC’s Robert Greenblatt has released a statement saying the miniseries is only “’in development,’ the first stage of any television series or movie, many of which never go to production,” adding that “speculation, demands, and declarations pertaining to something that isn’t created or produced yet seem premature.” In other words, you can probably just forget you ever heard about it.
CNN—which has its own Hillary Clinton documentary in the works—issued a similar response, after also being included in the ban. “We encouraged all interested parties to wait until the program premieres before judgments are made about it,” it reads. “Unfortunately, the RNC was not willing to do that.” Indeed, it seems the Republican Party has made a sweeping decision based on fear and assumption rather than fact, in perhaps the first time in its history.