*The next episode of HBO’s “Vice” will take viewers inside the White House with President Barack Obama and around Washington D.C.’s halls of power to explore the past eight years of America’s gross government dysfunction.
“Vice Special Report: A House Divided,” premiering Friday (Dec. 9) at 10 p.m. and running nearly 75-minutes, will feature host Shane Smith conducting interviews all over D.C. – from the Oval Office at the White House to a Republican social club – looking to uncover the exact causes of the deep political divide across the country.
“This election was very interesting to our demo, and to our audience, but they are sort of disappointed with the mainstream take on it,” said Smith, according to Variety. “We wanted to get a little deeper into why this is happening, into what are the roots of these reactions. I think that is sort of signature Vice.” He was initially worried the documentary would be “too policy-wonky,” but realized that his viewers “are very interested in this sort of topic, and not just to have sound bites. They want a history of how we got to where we are.”
The documentary took eight months to produce, Smith said. Smith interviews President Obama; former U.S. Speaker of the House John Boehner; former U.S. House Minority Whip Eric Cantor; and Republican pollster Frank Luntz, among others.
A previous Vice documentary on prison reform, which followed President Obama on a visit to Oklahoma federal prison, had made an impact on both Republican and Democratic sources, Smith said. Boehner and Cantor, he suggested, wanted to get their stories out after leaving Congress in the wake of the rise of the Tea Party. “Everyone had a lot to say, and wanted to say it,” he noted.
Via Variety’s Brian Steinberg:
In one of the documentary’s last scenes, President Obama openly worries that a frustrated nation may push to make changes to some of America’s bedrock institutions and laws – and wonders where that might lead. “There could be a movement for systemic change, and that’s a problem, because when a revolution happens, you don’t know where it’s going to end up,” said Smith. One of the lessons of the program is “let’s not get so frustrated with our democracy that we blow it up, because we never know where that is going to lead. This is a guy who has seen a lot of shit in the last eight years, and if that’s his biggest worry, then that should be our biggest worry,” said Smith.
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