Eight years ago, well before their hit series Evil came to an untimely end, Robert and Michelle King had another horror series that aired on CBS that unceremoniously got the chop: BrainDead. And the show, which ran from June to September 2016 at the height of the presidential election, posited something that seemed both completely ridiculous and eerily possible at the same time: What if everyone in government had brainworms that were trying to take over the world?
The 13-episode series follows Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Laurel Healy, a documentarian with no funding for her work who ends up in Washington, D.C. to toil for her democratic senator brother Luke (Danny Pino). And as with any good story set in the Capitol, conspiracy is afoot! In this case, she and a pair of constituents (pseudoscientist Gustav and doctor Rochelle, played by Johnny Ray Gill and Nikki M. James, respectively) discover that alien bugs from a meteor are destroying half of the brains of anyone they get inside of and controlling them. Needless to say, both sides of the political spectrum—including Tony Shalhoub as Republican senator Red Wheatus, Aaron Tveit as his chief of staff Gareth Ritter, and Jan Maxwell as Democratic senator Ella Pollack—find themselves taken over by these bugs, steadily working together to end humanity as we know it.
BrainDead represents the crossroads between political commentary and the balance of horror and humor that exists in most of Robert and Michelle King’s work. As amusing and often flippant as The Good Wife (and, to a greater extent, The Good Fight) could be about tackling the justice system, it is nothing short of riveting watching them directly tackle the hypocrisy and idiocy inherent in our existing political system. To do this through a loose reimagining of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is the same kind of inventive scripting that made many of Evil’s monsters of the week so potent: Horror is the perfect means for exploring societal rot.
Watching this horrifying and hilarious show unfold back in 2016 was one thing. But revisiting the series on the precipice of another miserable and anxiety-inducing presidential election really emphasizes just what a treasure BrainDead is. Put simply: It’s satire done right, and what makes that so clear is that its barbs aren’t limited to either side of the aisle, with the show choosing instead to emphasize just how exhaustingly useless the entire political system is. To borrow a line from The Simpsons, while Republicans might “want what’s worst for everyone,” Democrats simply “hate life and ourselves” and “can’t govern.”
Maxwell and Shalhoub, in performances that mirrored Clinton and Trump months before the latter won the presidency, are both playing characters that are as incompetent as they are calculating. The sheer mundanity of how they go about stopping democracy in its tracks, at once burying inane laws in bloated bills and outright lying to the public in order to try and start a war, is arguably the show’s most horrifying feature. It’s practically impossible to not watch in terror as you realize that the show was having the same discussions that we are still engaging in today, tackling topics like whether or not to dive into an overseas war fueled purely by Islamophobia and how much funding to redirect to something so cruel.
But, as stated, the best horror goes hand-in-hand with humor, and so much of the show leans into B-movie absurdity in the best way, likely a result of Robert King’s history writing sci-fi horror films for none other than Roger Corman in the 1980s. For all the gorgeous monster designs that came with Evil, which sometimes borrowed from more “respectable” genre films like The Night Of The Hunter (itself a work that excelled at blending laughs and thrills), there’s something deliciously garish about the special effects that come with the bugs, their cheapness deliberately existing at odds with the live-action humans and further emphasizing the gap between real and unreal. And just like its sister show, many episodes indulge in the kind of giddy “cheap” tricks that many a B-movie did, be it via exploding heads or brains being scraped into Tupperware.
This balance of stupid and smart is key to the way BrainDead plays, down to the camp performances of its talented ensemble, which reflect how our seemingly functional establishments, and those who run them, reveal themselves to be incompetent under the slightest bit of scrutiny. There’s also a certain Kafkaesque quality to the way the Kings dive into laborious government processes, from the minutiae of debating budgetary restrictions down to the ways the FBI euphemizes “torture” (“enhanced interrogation”) and all the excuses they can make in order to waterboard someone for no reason. Take how this ties into the show’s amusingly long episode titles—like “The Insanity Principle: How Extremism In Politics Is Threatening Democracy In The 21st Century” and “Back To Work: A Behind-The-Scenes Look At Congress And How It Gets Things Done (And Often Doesn’t)”—which play into the kind of buzzword-laden headline writing that has infested contemporary cultural writing. On this show and others, the Kings and their staff are always peppering in these barbs any which way they can, making these projects all the more fun to behold.
With Broadway stars like Maxwell, James, Tveit, Meg Hilty, and Beth Malone in its cast, the series also blends the musical into its melange of genres, emphasizing playfulness in addressing the political in the same way that Stephen Sondheim himself once did with Assassins (which the Kings are a prime choice for adapting). Each episode even opens with a “previously on” song by Jonathan Coulton, whose own legal kerfuffle with Glee would be the basis of an episode of The Good Wife, and who would go on to create original Schoolhouse Rock-style musical shorts for that show. He serves as both an omniscient recapper and in-universe character much like the narrator in Sondheim’s Into the Woods, often breaking the fourth wall and acting like the bugs are spreading beyond the show. The musicality extends to the ridiculous recurrent use of “You Might Think” by The Cars, revealed in the world of the show as a song that mimics “what spaces sounds like” as both a literal earworm and a winking representation of the looming infection.
BrainDead is also something of a perfect time capsule of its era—not just through the inclusion of a now-defunct app like Periscope, which is used to broadcast a sit-in by senators when the camera feed is cut (and was based on a real event), but in the way its relative centrism (that of its creators) comes to the foreground. There’s a bit of naivete in the relationship between Laurel and her love interest, Tveit’s Gareth Ritter, though this kind of reaching across the aisle seems of a piece with the Kings’ optimism before Trump was elected. It’s hard to remember there once was a world where it was mildly believable that these opposing sides could connect, in this case a staunch Republican who manages to make a monster look presentable falling for and working alongside a lifelong Democrat with potentially loose morals. But even this kind of fantasy is challenged by the creators themselves, who are always acknowledging the limitations of love in the face of completely disparate worldviews as well as how little impact or change even the most vocal politicians can make.
That a series like BrainDead ever aired on a network as conservative, formally and politically, as CBS is nothing short of a miracle, but the Kings excel at just this kind of subversion. The duo plays with expectations constantly, creating truly radical works under the guise of convention, whether that’s by outright upending the entire justice system in shows presented as court-based procedural dramas or having some of the most unique discussions about the intersection of faith and science through a monster-of-the-week series. BrainDead was a series that wasn’t afraid to show blood and guts, that had no shame in diving into the sexual impulses of its characters, and that explicitly confronted how grossly ineffective our political landscape was (and still is). Even as they rushed to an appropriate closure in its final episodes, trying to wrap up the show’s narrative arc in a satisfactory way upon cancellation (and prior to their plans to take these brainworms from D.C. to Hollywood and beyond), there was no doubt that the Kings had complete control over the tale they were telling.
In these horrifying few days that remain before the 2024 presidential election, as we are forced to witness last-minute pitches, headline-grabbing insanity, and an onslaught of bad memes, it’s hard not to think back on BrainDead and its reflection of the 2016 election. Just like the characters on the show, we find ourselves numb and watching as both of of America’s core parties encourage genocide and war while blaming “the other side.” We sit helplessly as extremism overtakes rationality and wonder if any ounce of reasonable protest will ever reach the ears of those with the power to effect change. BrainDead may not offer any respite from the toxic cycle that we find ourselves in—and perhaps have always been trapped in when it comes to politics—but at least it offers something to laugh and scream at other than all the bullshit that comes out of a candidate’s mouth.
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