‘Quantico’ to tackle Trump in upcoming episode: showrunner

Team Udayavani, Mar 23, 2017, 10:07 AM IST

Los Angeles: Josh Safran, the showrunner of Priyanka Chopra’s “Quantico”, has teased that the upcoming episodes will deal with President Donald Trump and his policies. 

“Quantico” debuted its latest series reboot on Monday in the US, effectively swapping in Trump for terrorism and kicking off the plot for the remaining nine episodes in the ABC drama’s second season.

Since Trump’s election, “Quantico”, like many shows currently airing on broadcast and cable, has shifted its lens away from fantasy in a bid to reflect more of today’s real-life political climate and cultural landscape. 

“We’re in sort of a paradigm shift for the show,” Safran tells The Hollywood Reporter. 

“We’re now looking at the ways in which people profit off of terror and it allows us to build a plot around something that is real and possible.” 

When asked if there are too many shows tackling Trump on TV, Safran says, “We’re not special. That’s the role of art in any time, to reflect the time that it’s in. If it’s a time of good prosperity, often we don’t look to politics to write about, we look to write about different times or different period of strife in peoples’ lives. 

“But when there’s political upheaval or unrest in the country, artists tend to skew towards politics and how they relate to people. That’s what you’re seeing is so many shows turning in that direction.” 

Safran says its freeing to not have to invent so many stories and villains, since the real world is providing the material, but he notes one important distinction. 

“I look to ‘The Good Fight’ and their recent episode about the shelved SVU episode about Trump – they took something very specific and turned that into a story,” he says. 

“Instead of doing an overarching, ‘We’re going to do Trump,’ we’re looking at specific things, like fake news and the Muslim registry.