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As Stephen Colbert prepares his new Showtime animated series about Donald Trump, Our Cartoon President, the talk-show host joked that he has a bone to pick with Michael Wolff, the author of the explosive new Trump book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.
“I think Michael Wolff stole all 10 of our episodes. Because there’s nothing in that book that’s not in our show, and we just guessed—I’m not joking,” Colbert said at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour. “The great thing about the Trump administration is whatever you imagine, you’re right! Everything else is a lie.”
Our Cartoon President, executive produced by Colbert, is treated like a documentary set behind the scenes at the White House.
“The show is the interpersonal relationships of the people that you don’t get to see,” Colbert said. “All of them people that you know, but the relationships that you imagine they have, animated. Which I think at this point is the only way to truly, accurately capture what it must be like to be inside the White House.”
While the show will premiere on Feb. 11, ahead of Homeland’s Season 7 debut, Showtime will begin streaming the first episode online and via its VOD platforms two weeks earlier, on Jan. 28. That’s two days ahead of Trump’s first State of the Union address.
On Saturday, Showtime released the full trailer for Our Cartoon President, which in true Trumpian fashion, bills itself as “the highest rated show of all time.”
Unlike The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, where Colbert said he and his writers often have to throw away “10 minutes of monologue” at the last minute because of breaking news from the Trump administration, Our Cartoon President isn’t of the moment.
“The purpose of the show is not to respond to the references of today’s news cycle,” Colbert said. “It’s about what’s going on behind the doors of the most important house in the world with the most important man in the world.” He noted that Wolff’s book was “interesting to read for tone and behavior that can be amplified comedically.”
That said, each episode will open with a topical scene that will be animated that week to remind the audience that “this behavior is really not what you want in the White House,” Colbert said.
For example, “tomorrow’s show could have a cold open all about how he’s ‘a very stable genius,’” said Colbert, referring to Trump’s Saturday morning tweetstorm. “Which is what we’re trying to capture with this show is just how stable his genius is.”
Colbert said Our Cartoon President won’t make jokes about Trump’s son Barron or daughter Tiffany, sticking only to spoofing family members who are in Trump’s administration.
That includes Don Jr. and Erik Trump, whom showrunner R.J. Fried refers to as “our Beavis and Butt-Head,” Colbert said. “They want to please their dad. Ivanka wants to build a brand. Jeff Sessions has his own motivations, which he only hints at currently in the show. … All the Cabinet members think they can ride the tiger for their own purposes.”
Because the show only features current members of Trump’s administration, there’s no place for the many people who have already departed their White House jobs. “There’s a graveyard of characters that have been designed and are no longer there,” said Fried. That includes Omarosa Manigault-Newman, who “definitely would have” been a part of the show, according to Colbert.
Our Cartoon President will be yet another series that mines the Trump presidency for comedy, but Colbert said he’s not worried about so-called “Trump fatigue,” noting, “He’s the president of the United States. There’s no escaping him. It’s like ‘oxygen fatigue.’ That’s why I like doing the comedy—it keeps me from being fatigued.”
One of the reasons Colbert was able to be involved with Our Cartoon President is that Chris Licht, who arrived as Late Show executive producer in April 2016 and also is an executive producer of the Showtime series, helped lighten his Late Show duties.
Colbert recalled that when he first met Licht about joining the Late Show, Licht told him, “Any moment you’re not thinking about being funny onstage, I’ve failed.” During his first two months at the Late Show, Licht said, he spent his time asking control-freak Colbert, “Why are you in this meeting?”
Now that Licht has taken so much off his plate, “this is actually easier than the old gig,” Colbert said, referring to The Colbert Report, which was only a half-hour and aired four times a week.
