Showtime's The Reagans tries to show a direct connection between the rise of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump to the presidency

Vanity Fair

Amid the 2016 presidential election campaign, Veep and Succession executive producer Frank Rich wrote a New York magazine essay on how the Trump campaign shared a lot of similarities to Reagan's campaigns to become president in 1976 and 1980. Director Matt Tyrnauer tries to illustrate the similarities in his four-part docuseries The Reagans. "Most people thought a Reagan presidency was a near impossibility because he was not taken seriously by the educated elite in the country,” Tyrnauer tells Vanity Fair. “He was a figure of ridicule, improbability, considered to be strange but intelligent and far too right-wing to ever capture the presidency. The joke was on all of the people who underestimated him.” Tyrnauer adds of Reagan: "He was the televised president that American media was waiting for ever since JFK was killed in Dallas. TV news was at its apex at exactly the time that he was running in 1980. So he was tailor-made for the media culture that the political elites, and even the media elites to a large extent, missed. That they underestimated him is something that’s always worth remembering, so (it) was part of my mission to show that.”

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• The Reagans is a superficial overview of the rise of Ronald Reagan: "An assemblage of archival footage and talking heads, The Reagans is certainly more pointed and zippily edited than if it had run on, say, PBS," says Inkoo Kang. "But there’s little here that isn’t conventional progressive history, even if some of the minor details retain their power to shock. I already knew, for example, that Nancy was pilloried for her Marie Antoinette-like aloofness and profligacy as first lady. But it was news to me that china sets that cost $1,000 per person arrived at the White House on the same day that Reagan’s $1 billion cuts to the school-lunch program necessitated the government to reclassify ketchup a vegetable to skirt around nutritional standards. (Director Matt) Tyrnauer succeeds in illustrating familiar concepts like the Southern strategy and racial dogwhistles, but his criticisms of Reagan’s presidency never quite cohere into definitive (let alone fresh) 'take' on the conservative icon. The documentary only offers a quick gloss on historical forces like the Cold War and the rise of the religious right in situating its subject. There’s no meaningful contextualization of Reagan among other presidents, nor much about his political legacy."
• Tyrnauer on Reagan vs. Trump: "Reagan’s playing a president," says the director. "He did it so effectively it went over the heads of the press and the public. It was one of those strange moments in American history where you couldn’t tell where the movie’s ending and life’s beginning. He never got cast in the Jimmy Stewart part that he eventually got to play in real life. Trump, in a coarser era, when reality TV rules our lives, decided to play it like an insult comedian, and as himself."