File under Culture Wars, Upcoming: Joel Surnow, the vocally conservative co-creator of Fox’s 24, is shopping around a ten-hour miniseries about the Kennedy family. And from the description in Variety, anyway, it doesn’t sound like a love letter. Reports the trade mag, the press release from the potential project’s distributor says it aims to look atÂ
“the soiled and crooked steps” the family took to get to the White House.
“It also tells the historical stories that are associated with the Kennedy era — the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis, the civil rights struggle, the mob connection — each one told in the context of personal, Kennedy-family dramas.”
The Kennedys are familiar fodder for TV miniseries. So are contentious political subjects: see the fisticuffs, in recent years, over The Reagans and The Path to 9/11, which angered Republicans and Democrats respectively. In both those cases, I criticized people who judged each respective project unwatched, so I’ll take my own advice on this one for now.