Quantico returns tonight for its mid-season premiere. At a recent press screening, the main thing ELLE.com wanted to know was: How did the seismic shift of the election results change the show?
It certainly lit a fire in the show's creative team. "[Co-executive producer Cameron Litvack] pulled the room together and was like, look, we're the people in the world that get to write about this and talk about it," said writer and co-producer Beth Schacter. "So let's use it, and not run away from it."
But how would the popular drama integrate our altered state with its own story? One of the most compelling parts of the show is how it acts as a kind of alternate reality. For example, in Quantico, there's a female Democratic president at the helm: Claire Haas, played by Marcia Cross. But it's not just pure wish fulfillment. "We have a Democratic female president in the show, but we can talk about how people don't want a Democratic female president, and what they might try to do to upset the balance of that—that allows us to talk about the world right now," said creator, executive producer and showrunner Joshua Safran.
"It's like The West Wing," said Safran, referencing another show that depicted a fictitious Democratic presidency during the reality of a Republican presidency. "West Wing's hype [came] because Bush was president and [we] got to see a more hopeful side. But unfortunately, we are [portraying] a president that everyone is trying to take down."
"Even if Hillary had won, as I was saying, we'd still be a divided states of America," added Litvack. "Just because a woman is now the president on the show doesn't necessarily mean the world is going to be wonderful. There's still going to be the problem. It's a question of where the problem's coming from."
This suggestion, that there wouldn't necessarily be a lack of turmoil if we'd elected a white, female Democratic president, echoes the excitement, but also discussion and critique, of the recent Women's Marches in Washington, DC and around the world this weekend in reaction to President Trump's inauguration.
But Safran said the show hadn't swerved too much from its set political path after the election. He explained that on Quantico, they'd created more of a Gerald Ford situation than a Trump facsimile: Ford was the appointed, rather than elected, Vice-President for Richard Nixon, after Spiro Agnew stepped down. And when Ford stepped in after Nixon's resignation, he became the—non-elected—president. "It didn't exactly change the show so much, as we already planned to have Marcia Cross's character to become president. Because [when] the president steps down, she's the VP...What changed was the dialogue about how that character wasn't elected."
Still, Safran quickly added, "We are definitely talking about Russian hacking in an episode."
In a separate interview with Priyanka Chopra—who was recovering from a concussion sustained on set—the actress was more cautious in her commentary. While Chopra is eager to call Quantico a topical show unafraid to tackle issues such as gun control, the relationship between Palestine and Israel, and the targeting of "people who look like me," she was hesitant to go into more detail about real-world politics.
"Look, I am Indian, but I do work in America and I think as a foreigner who is working in the country, I sense and I feel the nerves around my colleagues, around my friends...I sense people being unsettled, and of course that makes me unsettled," she said. Chopra considers herself very apolitical, and was cautious about talking the nitty-gritty of the Trump presidency. Her character, Alex Parrish, has a different perspective again. "Alex is someone who loves this country, and with everything that's happened in her life and all the trauma that she's been through with her father, law enforcement is the only family that she knows," said Chopra. "Her country is the only home that she knows."
However, Chopra was affected by one particular part of the aftermath: the idea that an American female president would stay a fiction for much, much longer than anticipated. Chopra not only remains hopeful about the prospect—she's adamant that such a dream is in no danger of dying.
"I definitely don't think that the world is at a place where we can't [even] imagine it." She points to statistics on female leaders around the world and international precedent, including in her own home country. "We had Indira Gandhi as our female prime minister in the '80s, you know. Of course, there's England and there's Australia...so many countries which have had female leaders."
"That's definitely not a dream that's too far away," says Chopra. "That should be not something that people need to feel is an aspiration that we can forget. I absolutely won't."
