Matt Stone and Trey Parker's President George W. Bush pre-9/11 satire That’s My Bush! was prescient about politics

Mel Magazine

Airing for one season in April and May 2001, the Comedy Central sitcom was the South Park creators' first attempt at a live-action series. "Though it addressed hot-button issues with their familiar shock aesthetic — like casting a fetal puppet as an anti-choice advocate who was unsuccessfully aborted while in utero — critics and viewers alike were surprised to find it was less an evisceration of Bush than a sendup of family sitcom tropes. You had the president as the bumbling but well-intentioned head of the home, Laura Bush as the demanding and horny housewife, a sassy maid (played by the legendary Marcia Wallace) and a cheerful neighbor who could inexplicably pop in whenever he felt like it," says Miles Klee. "The theme song, too, was right on the nose. While mocking the farcical plot structures used time and again in TV comedies from the 1960s onward (trying to be in two places at once, characters trapped together in a confined space, a misunderstanding that snowballs into a catastrophe), Parker and Stone seemed to suggest there was something predictable, even cliché, to the role of commander-in-chief. As is typical of their libertarian, both-sides-are-wrong mentality, the episodes envisioned Bush simply trying to placate everyone at once instead of pushing for the conservative agenda that defined his administration. The show was so politically agnostic, in fact, that the creators — who had originally planned a different show, titled Everybody Loves Al, focusing on a presumptive President Al Gore — were able to quickly reframe the concept around Bush after the 2000 electoral stalemate had been resolved. The quick shift in cast and production mirrored a dumb prevailing assumption in that contest: The two candidates were, as far as anyone cared, the same guy." While it's easy to attribute That's My Bush!'s cancelation to 9/11, Comedy Central actually gave it the axe a month before the attacks. Klee adds: "That’s My Bush! is worth unearthing, both for what it reveals about the public consciousness 20 years ago and for what it anticipated in the decades to follow...Voters may have thought they were getting a centrist in the 'compassionate conservative,' and That’s My Bush! stems from the line that he’s a harmless dolt, but it also hints at a corrupt dynasty and the moral bankruptcy of gaining power for no other reason than thinking you deserve it. It’s no accident that the best TV skewering of Trump was another genre parody, The President Show, in which comedian Anthony Atamanuik hosted a late-night variety show as the spotlight-hogging narcissist himself."