In what could be the most understandable decision in the history of television, TNT has decided not to move forward with its modern-day Civil War pilot Civil. This comes after the network was optimistic about the project for several months, even going so far as to order multiple scripts and plan a special preview for the pilot in November, but TNT started to second-guess the whole thing when the pilot was finished in August. At that point, the network decided not to rush the show into development, and now Deadline is reporting that it has dropped Civil entirely.
So what happened between then and now? A little thing called the election of Donald Trump. As it turns out, Civil wasn’t just about a war splitting the country in half, it was about a war that happens in the aftermath of “a hotly contested presidential election,” and it would’ve told the story of this war from the point-of-view of people “whose actions—amplified in an age of instant media—add fuel to the conflict and affect the fate of the entire country.” Considering we just had a hotly contested presidential election where the guy who won has a nasty habit of doing stupid things that are amplified by instant media, it just seems like the sort of idea that wouldn’t be especially entertaining anymore. Also, Ken Burns is just going to end up making this show in a few years anyway.
Civil came from A Simple Plan writer Scott Smith and it would’ve starred Bradley Whitford, Courtney B. Vance, Toby Jones, and Enrique Murciano.