Donald Trump’s upset defeat of Hillary Clinton was one of those moments in time that, we can all agree, came and went far too quickly—a fabulous shooting star that held us spellbound as it streaked across the November sky, leaving behind only the auric glow of fading memory and the ache of regret that we may never experience its like again. But fear not! The New York Times reports that TriStar Television has optioned the recently released Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign for a TV series, so that we might relive the 2016 presidential election over and over, week after week, for so long as our hearts beat on and our DVRs continue to function. We could spend our every idle hour poring over the endlessly fascinating details of how Clinton failed and Donald Trump managed to become president, forever!
We know what you’re saying. By rehashing the foibles of Clinton’s campaign, weighing the impact of various factors like her inability to connect with working-class voters, or replaying the confounding chain of events surrounding the FBI’s investigation into her emails, don’t we risk spoiling some of the magic? If we just sit around, day after day, arguing over whether it was her connections to Wall Street, or her husband’s revitalized sex scandals, or WikiLeaks’ reveal of the DNC’s machinations to undermine Bernie Sanders, or the baffling lack of on-the-ground campaigning in battleground states like Michigan—if we pick and paw at it like this, do we not then mangle its ineffable beauty? Aren’t some things better appreciated from afar and from deep within the soul, like the gossamer threads of a spiderweb, sparkling silver in the midday sun, or how a reality TV host with open contempt for most of the rest of the world was chosen to lead it?
Still, take heart: Producers John Davis and John Fox have taken plenty of things that, at first glance, wouldn’t seem to sustain weekly entertainment—like the workaday drudgery of capturing the world’s most dangerous criminals on The Blacklist—and transformed them into successful TV shows. And now they’ll attempt to do the same for Shattered, journalist Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ revealing exploration of how Clinton’s dysfunctional, directionless campaign slowly imploded among staff in-fighting and around a candidate who lacked a clear vision and had no apparent understanding of how to connect with ordinary people. It’ll be a compelling character study, as well as a thrill-a-minute ride, all the way up to its dynamite finale when Donald Trump ends up in the White House and gets to do whatever he wants! Unfortunately, this is only a limited series, so—much like the 2016 election itself—we’ll just have to savor every moment while it’s here.
Beyond that, those who want to lose themselves in the details of the 2016 election will just have to content themselves with HBO’s adaptation of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s upcoming book, Ryan Murphy’s election-themed American Horror Story, Comedy Central’s The President Show, the thousands of books and op-eds on “Why Clinton Lost” being published at an hourly clip, and Trump’s every speech and tweet.