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• Author: Hugh Linehan
• Published date: 19 December 2020
• Date: 19 December 2020

The reality hit home this week when I realised I'd lost three-quarters of an hour listening to a discussion about what certain appointments might mean for the prospects of achieving incremental improvements to US health insurance programmes at the state level under a Biden administration. No offence, but this was not the demented apocalyptic clowncar ride I signed up for.

Part of the president-elect's pitch to voters was that if they elected him they would no longer have to think every day about what was happening in Washington DC. Judging by the evidence, he's already delivering on that promise.

Some will protest that the fact Trump will be evicted from the West Wing doesn't mean he is exiting the stage. There's every chance he will continue to troll the American public in general and the Republican party in particular with mass rallies, incessant tweets and teases about running again in 2024. But frankly, none of that particularly matters. For at least two years, we are free of him. All of which, obviously, is to be celebrated. The 45th president has been a stain on his country's political history, and his defeat marks the most significant reverse for the modern strain of right-wing demagoguery since it raised its ugly head a decade or so ago.

And yet, there's no gainsaying the existence of that nagging sense of emptiness you get when a long-running series rolls its credits for the last time. As the two cops say at the end of The Truman Show, "What else is on?"

It's been common practice during the Trump presidency to compare its narrative rhythms to those of longform TV drama, with all its ebbs and flows, its cliffhangers and payoffs. So season one ended on the we're-not-in-Kansas-anymore surreality of election night in 2016, while season two closed with a big close-up of James Comey's face as he realised he'd just been punked. By that reckoning, we're just wrapping up season nine, a good run for any primetime show (albeit with a little help from the US constitution and Republican senators).

The strength of the series was never in the writers' room (sloppy plotting, woeful dialogue) but in...