TV’s newest political potboiler is more erudite than “The West Wing” and more intense than “24” — and it’s coming to, of all places, PBS.
In “Deadlock,” an assemblage of government officials, politicos, clergy and media convenes to hash out — in real time — the fallout from a presidential election fraught with threats of misinformation, legal imbroglios and protests. Aaron Tang, a professor at UC Davis School of Law, guides such notables as Jeh C. Johnson, the former secretary of Homeland Security; Kris Kobach, the attorney general of Kansas; Scott Pelley, the “60 Minutes” correspondent; Dr. Rachel Bitecofer, a political strategist; and Dr. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., a professor of African American studies at Princeton University through a harrowing Election Night in which every decision they make has the potential to result in dire consequences for U.S. democracy.
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“Even I was shocked at the decisions that were ultimately made,” Tang tells Variety. Still, the exercise is an important one, he adds, and the show helps viewers understand that discussion and compromise move things forward better than fighting and attacks on character that seem to be more the norm as the nation grows more polarized. The program was taped in front of a live audience on Monday, Sept. 9, at the New-York Historical Society in New York City, and panelists only learned of the central topic and storyline shortly before cameras began to roll.
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“The basic idea is that we want to put real leaders, real thought leaders, elected officials, in situations that rhyme with real life,” says Tang. The people who are involved in the program, he adds, “don’t always agree on cases, but this divisiveness in America is only going to improve if people who often disagree can talk to each other, can listen, can try to find common ground, can try to be friends, can realize that the people we disagree with are not our enemies.”
Before Tang’s grilling gets underway, “Deadlock” is introduced by Sonia Sotomayor and Amy Coney Barrett, two of the associate justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, who tell viewers of the importance of working with people despite disagreements over policy, law or politics. Others taking part in the “Deadlock” discussion are Adrian Fontes, Arizona secretary of state; Katie Harbath, the former Facebook executive and CEO of Anchor Change; Astead Herndon, a national politics reporter for The New York Times; Elise Jordan, a political analyst for NBC News; Mick Mulvaney, the former Trump White House official and South Carolina Congressman; Russell Moore, editor in chief of Christianity Today; and Gabriel Sterling, COO of the Office of the Georgia Secretary of State.
The program takes its cues from the Fred Friendly Seminars, a series of televised symposia orchestrated by the former president of CBS News and production partner with the venerable Edward R. Murrow in the early days of news programming on television. Friendly and his wife, Ruth, helped produce more than 100 seminars broadcast on PBS over the course of more than two decades. The seminars covered everything from medical care to nanotechnology to ethical decisions made the during a host of high-pressure scenarios.
The mission of “Deadlock,” like that of the Seminars, is “not to make up anybody’s mind, but to open minds, ” says Andy Lack, the executive producer of the program who had two stints running NBC News, nodding to Friendly’s original description of the original series, “and to make the agony of decision making so intense that you can only escape by thinking.”
The Friendly family, Lack says, was involved in the production, with Ruth Friendly, now 100 years old, on set during the “Deadlock” taping. A son, Andy Friendly, is on the production team, he says.
The hope is to bring more shows like “Deadlock” to PBS, says Lack. “We are just getting started. We are a start up in this line of work,” he says. The show is produced by GBH, the PBS Boston affiliate, and Lack and John Bredar, vice president of national programming for GBH, have been working on the program for most of 2024.
To make Friendly’s concept relevant to a new generation, however, producers had to add new twists and tweaks. They had to take into account how social media might inflame or distort a critical moment in the “Deadlock” narrative, and how quickly word might travel. They also had account for a new willingness for intense argument. Kovach, for example, denied the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, while Bitecofer is the author of a book titled “Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game.”
“These are not people that when you put them in a room you are expecting ‘Kum-bi-ya,'” says Tang, wo felt that several of the participants “were itching for a fight.”
Producers hope the show offers an alternative to what viewers might see elsewhere in news and analysis programs. “The objective here is to get at a conversation,” says Lack. “It’s not to go for the ‘OK, we just sparred for eight minutes, 12 minutes, in a segment that is often quite engaging and exciting.’ This is an hour,” he adds. “It’s a different game they are playing.”
The twist to “Deadlock” is that the hypothetical scenario at the center of the program gets worse as the hour goes on. “Agony was central to what Fred Friendly envisioned,” says Lack, and the show’s participants start to realize they can only make things better if they work together.
The hope is that viewers will find “Deadlock” too compelling to ignore — both to find out whether society survives and to understand that no one can argue their way through a national disaster. “You really do pull people into having to have that agonizing decision and think about it, think out loud about it,” says Lack. “Without any rehearsals.”
