Here and Now, HBO’s new metaphysical series, wasn’t conceived as a reaction to the election. It just appears that way.
“We never wanted to make this The Resistance: The Show, but this is the new reality,” says Here and Now‘s creator Alan Ball. “We live in a different America now, and we decided to make that part of the world the show takes place in.”
Here and Now follows Greg (Tim Robbins), a fading intellectual, Audrey (Holly Hunter), a do-gooder therapist, and their menagerie of mostly adopted children, plucked from such geographically disparate locations that together they resemble a model U.N. When one adopted son (Ramon, played by Daniel Zovatto) starts seeing visions of the number 11:11 everywhere, the family attempts to figure out whether he’s a more highly evolved being—or if he’s as unwell as the world around him.
After the end of his last HBO show, True Blood (which followed Six Feet Under), Ball spent a couple years trying to get some movies he’d written off the ground. When none panned out, he turned his attention toward another TV pilot, which also ended up not going anywhere. Finally, he just decided to write something that he himself would watch. He knew that HBO was in the market for a flagship family drama, so he began thinking about what the optimum post-Six Feet Under “family drama” from Alan Ball might look like. The answer turned out to be the pilot for Here and Now, which he wrote during the first half of 2016, and which HBO green-lighted as a series based on one script.
Ball and his producing partner Peter Macdissi actively sought out writers from a wide array of backgrounds to help infuse his show with viewpoints from the ethnic and cultural heritage of the people who populate it.
Starting in October of 2016, Ball spent ten weeks with his assembled writers, fleshing out the initial arc of the season more. During that fall, though, the world went through a seismic shift that ended up having a profound impact on the course of the show.
“The day after the election, we were all sort of shell-shocked and depressed and worried about the future,” Ball says. “We put away half a bottle of rum in the writers room, and at one point I remember saying, ‘Well, we have to look at this show as a platform to talk about this stuff.'”
Even though Ball conceived the show as taking place in the reality where Hillary Clinton became president and not much had changed, the premise may actually lend itself better to commenting on the reality in which Trump won and everything changed. For instance, Greg and Audrey have no idea that their three adopted children (now adults) poke fun of them for how proud they are of their own progressive nature—nor are they aware of how many on the Right consider people like them to be virtue-signalers.
For all of Here and Now’s commentary on society, it is still very much an Alan Ball HBO family drama. Siblings smoke pot together. Marital affairs are contemplated and consummated. The meaning of life remains frustratingly elusive. It’s just that in this particular family drama, the daughter who’s still a minor (Sosie Bacon) goes to a high school where the Northern European Heritage Society encourages white students to Be Proud of Your Race.
“I’m very lucky that I have a place to channel all that energy and I think it’s a very organic thing,” Ball says. “I don’t know how one would approach one’s work if one was feeling a tremendous amount of cultural anxiety and for that matter, existential anxiety, and have that not show up in the work.”