If you’ve been keeping up with American politics since Donald Trump took office in 2016, you’ll have no doubt heard of the name James Comey.
Comey was the director of the FBI from September 2013 to May 2017. During this time, he was tasked with investigating the controversy surrounding Hilary Clinton’s e-mails whilst Clinton was running for President in 2016 as the Democrat nomination. Describing the whole ordeal would take a lot of time but basically, it resulted in Comey becoming an incredibly controversial figure and he was eventually fired by Trump.
After Comey was fired he began writing A Higher Loyalty, which was released in 2018. Now that book has been picked up by Showtime and turned into a miniseries The Comey Rule. The first trailer for it has been released and it looks just as much like a controversial story of political intrigue as you might expect!
The Comey Rule focuses on the relationship between James Comey (Jeff Daniels) and Donald Trump (Brendan Gleeson) and goes through the build-up to the 2016 Presidential Election as well as Trump’s first months in office. Everything is covered – from the scandal surrounding Clinton’s e-mails to Trump’s relationship with Russia (and particularly with the country’s controversial president Vladimir Putin). The latter subject is something which became a real hot-button issue when Russia was accused of interfering with elections not just in America but in the UK and France as well.
From the onset, it seems very clear that this interpretation of Comey’s story isn’t exactly Comey-centric. Instead, Showtime describes it as “the story of two powerful figures, Comey and Trump, whose strikingly different personalities, ethics and loyalties put them on a collision course.” It isn’t just the Trump-and-Comey show either, as various other figures from the period pop up – including former president Barack Obama (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Robert Mueller (Peter Coyote), Jeff Sessions (Joe Lo Truglio), Andrew McCabe (Michael Kelly) and Sally Yates (Holly Hunter).
For the audience, watching this trailer was pretty weird and possibly even awkward at times. Gleeson seems to have The Donald’s shifty, at times awkward, yet gleefully arrogant demeanour nailed to a T in the trailer, which suggests an equally strong characterisation throughout the series. Meanwhile, the inclusion of so many familiar names really brings it home that these events only happened within the last 5 years.
On the eve of yet another controversial presidential election in America, The Comey Rule rearing its head now is almost too timely. It looks like it’ll be a hell of a watch though!
Words by Robert Percy
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