Trump vs. House of Cards: Is reality stranger than fiction?
Is it hard to create fiction when reality is so over the top?
With former reality TV star Donald Trump rising as a top Republican contender, the lead-up to the U.S. election seems both surreal and larger-than-life to many observers.
Today, pop culture scholar Bob Thompson and critic Lili Loofbourow join guest host Piya Chattopadhyay to discuss the current state of American politics and its TV parallels, like House of Cards and The West Wing.
House of Cards shows us a world where scandals abound and characters race to get ahead of inconvenient headlines, but this "veneer of decency", as Loofbourow puts it, no longer resonates.
"In the real world, Donald Trump's constant rewriting of the rules of politics is beginning to prove ... that maybe the very kinds of things that we thought would torpedo a career, don't — even if you don't deny them," Thompson tells Piya.