Despite already skewering politics with Veep and seeing its last stab at satire,The Brink, cancelled after just one season, HBO thinks it can crack the latter format with an adaptation of Barry Levinson's 1997 film Wag The Dog.
The original comedy saw a political strategist (Robert De Niro) engaging the services of a film producer (Dustin Hoffman) to create a fictional war scenario, so as to distract from a sex scandal surrounding the present. Yeah, we can see why someone might think it's the right time for this sort of story to come back.
Levinson himself is aboard to develop and potentially direct the pilot for the new show, with Rajiv Joseph writing the script. According to HBO, the result should hopefully be "an ode to the classic film but moving the weapons of mass distraction beyond politics and into business, entertainment and, yes, nonprofits. In the 21st century with the tools of social media at their hands, nothing is off limits to a small group of operators when it comes to manufacturing reality. Fake news is so yesterday."