Back in May, Netflix signed a massive deal with Barack and Michelle Obama bringing them on-board to produce a slate of shows for the streaming service. Now, six months later, it looks like they might have found their first project: a series about what the hell is going on inside the dysfunctional mess that is our government.
According to Deadline, the Obamas have acquired the rights to Michael Lewis’s latest book, The Fifth Risk, and are hoping to develop it into a potential Netflix series. In his new book, Lewis—the author of Moneyball and The Big Short—investigated the broken state of our federal agencies under Trump, and how the president seemingly doesn’t give a shit about any of it, beginning with the clusterfuck that was the hand-off from the departing Obama administration.
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“The Trump administration just didn’t show,” Lewis explained to NPR in a recent interview about the book. “Across the government, parking spaces were empty, and nice little finger sandwiches that had been laid out went uneaten, and briefing books went unopened—to the point where, when I roll in a few months later, I’m the first person who’s heard the briefing that the Trump administration was supposed to get.”
He added that when the Trump administration finally got around to filling some spots in understaffed agencies, like the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture, “very few [new hires] had any kind of qualifications for the jobs they were being sent into.”
This seems like an ideal first project for the Obamas: Lewis’s previous books have a long track record of being adapted into hit films, and this is something the former president is pretty uniquely qualified to discuss. Lewis is expected to give more details about the project during an interview on Katie Couric’s podcast Thursday. Until then, it’s hard to say for sure what the former first couple will do with The Fifth Risk, but the whole thing kind of sounds like Barack and Michelle want to make an entire series about how everything completely went to shit after they moved out of the White House.
Obama originally said they wanted to work on “lifting people up” in their Netflix projects, but apparently, they have to get through at least one dig at Trump’s total ineptitude before moving onto whatever uplifting series they make next, like some choose-your-own-adventure show or—who knows—bringing back American Vandal for a third season. One can dream.
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