Do We Really Need Another Show About President Trump?

This weekend, Showtime revealed the release date for its latest comedy, Our Cartoon President. Based on the animated Trump segments that appear on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the series was announced in mid December, and its first episode is set to premiere ahead of the State of the Union. Showtime is a premium network known for putting out premium content, and Stephen Colbert is one of the best political comedians of our time. But I ask you: do we need another show about Donald Trump?

This isn’t to say that Our Cartoon President will be bad. There’s some great talent behind it, however so-so the trailer may seem. Not only is Colbert involved in the project, but so is Chris Licht, the showrunner and executive producer of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. There’s also some great voice acting talent involved. Jeff Bergman, who’s probably best known for voicing Bugs Bunny, will be the voice of Trump, and the person who is one of the best Bernie Sanders impersonators of all time James Adomian will voice Ted Cruz.

It’s also important to note screeners for this show aren’t available yet. Our Cartoon President could be the greatest thing to ever premiere in all of 2018 or the worst. Without seeing it, it’s difficult to know And yet I ask you: do we need another show about Donald Trump?

Here’s the thing about Our Cartoon President — it’s been done before. I’m not talking about Comedy Central‘s The President’s Show or the variety of shows that tackled Trump last year, though I’ll address both of those further down. I’m talking about our day-to-day life. Donald Trump and the Trump administration dominate headlines every day. If it’s not some newly implemented law or overturned policy, it’s another tweet that’s questionable at best, insane at worst. Trump already overwhelms our waking life, and responses to his administration already bleed pretty deeply into our entertainment. Another show explicitly about him feels exhausting.

It’s a feeling that the creators of Our Cartoon President are certainly familiar with. When asked during the show’s panel at the Television Critics Association if the creators were worried about audiences having Trump fatigue, Colbert said, “It’s like having oxygen fatigue. You’re in a democracy, and he’s the President. That’s why I like doing the comedy. It keeps me from being fatigued. People ask me, ‘How do you, like, deal with the news every day? Does it wear on you?’ I’m, like, ‘Yeah, but I have this great thing where I get to go out to the audience and we have this sort of shared catharsis to laugh at it.’ If I didn’t get to do the show, I’d be much more tired of the president, but it keeps it fresh to be able to laugh at the devil.”

That’s fair. But I have a question for Our Cartoon President coming from the swatches of people who don’t perform comedy for a living. From the people who don’t express themselves and their frustrations through the art of television or comedy and instead use entertainment as a way to escape the horrors of daily life. From the people who spend their valuable free time catching up on news about our president before flipping through show after show, movie after movie that’s been transparently inspired by this current administration: do we need another show about Donald Trump?

Donald Trump had his show. It was called The Apprentice and has run for over 15 years now. He currently has his own show. If you’re being literal, you can watch it every time the White House live streams Sarah Huckabee Sanders. If you’re being more generous — which you honestly should be in this current political environment — you can see the Trump show on every news channel just about any time. You can also see it every single night on almost every late night show. Colbert, Seth Meyers, Samantha Bee, Chelsea Handler, even Jimmy Kimmel at times, they’re all telling their own version of the Trump show.

Then there’e the actual modern-day Trump show, Anthony Atamanuik‘s The President Show. The Comedy Central series first season received a 67 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and its first episode premiered to about 0.64 million viewers. By its final episode, those numbers had fallen to about 0.28 million viewers. There are likely a lot of reasons for that. Atamanuik, while known in comedy and critical circles, still hasn’t reached mainstream celebrity status. Also, the series premiered at 10:30 p.m. on Thursday, and those numbers only reflect live viewers, not streamed watches. Still, The President Show didn’t get a great reception and it had the advantage of having one of the best Trump impersonators, being able to react to the news story of the day in real time, and timeliness.

The President Show premiered in mid-April, around the time when the world was realizing that no, the never-ending cycle of Trump news wasn’t going to slow down. Our Cartoon President is going to premiere a year into Trump’s presidency, and though there will be a live action segment at the beginning of every episode that can respond to the news of today, it’s bound by the limits of animation. It can only be so relevant. Do we need another show about Donald Trump?

What Our Cartoon President lacks in timeliness it claims it will make up for in exploring depth. “The show is the interpersonal relationships of the people that you don’t get to see, all people you know, but the relationships you imagine they have, animated, which I think at this point is the only way to truly accurately capture what it must be like to be inside the White House,” Colbert said.

But with a White House that leaks information so regularly is seems as though they don’t know the meaning of the word “secret,” what more is there to learn? The late night host even inadvertently acknowledged that very argument a second later. “I think Michael Wolff stole all ten of our episodes to write that damn book of his because there’s nothing in that book that’s not in our show. And we just guessed,” he said about Fire and Fury.

Our Cartoon President isn’t even the first animated show to explore Trump’s presidency. BoJack Horseman devoted a major plot line in Season 4 to a celebrity who stumbled his way into an elected position. Rick and Morty answered a longstanding cliffhanger with a chilling episode about a manipulative politician. And then there’s South Park, a show that depicted Donald Trump being raped to death in 2015. South Park, a show that spent all of 2016 mocking Mr. Garrison’s rise to power and progressively getting more orange. South Park, which featured a chillingly relateable episode about a character freaking out about North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ended with Kyle and its Trump stand-in nuking Canada. It should also be noted that last season was one of the weakest in the show’s history largely because of Trump fatigue.

Animation has covered Trump’s presidency. Comedy has covered Trump’s presidency. Television has covered Trump’s presidency. Every element of life has more than covered Trump’s presidency. So I ask you: do we really need another show about Donald Trump?

Our Cartoon President will premiere on Showtime Sunday, February 11 at 8 p.m. ET.