Netflix continues to dust everyone in its race for television supremacy: Having landed deals for original content from major players including Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy, the streaming giant just signed Barack and Michelle Obama to a deal to produce original content.
The Netflix press release reads, “the Obamas will produce a diverse mix of content, including the potential for scripted series, unscripted series, docu-series, documentaries and features.” Content from our favorite power couple will hit the service as early as 2019.
The Obamas have proven time and again that they boss up in the spotlight – everything from stand-up Barack at every White House Correspondents Dinner to Michelle doing “Carpool Karaoke demonstrates the charisma that flows from them both. But I think this Netflix thing is an opportunity for them to be, well, less “presidential” and a bit more real.
Here are a few ideas that I’d love to see come from this deal: (Obamas, if you’re reading and you pick any of these, I ask only for a small fee. A taste, really.)
Oh, Joe!
The Joe Biden memes were the best thing to come out of the turn of 2017 when we still wanted to hang ourselves following the election. Imagine those memes as a multi-camera sitcom in which Biden plays the rascally sidekick to Barack’s straight man. It’s Netflix, so you can include all the profanity we all know Biden uses in real life. An example scene: Biden losing his shit in the War Room, yelling about what he’s going to do to that “uncle-f—ing meatball Kim-Jong Un” when he gets his hands on him. Biden should be played by Michael “Merle from The Walking Dead” Rooker. Needs a laugh track for every time someone says “Oh, Joe!”
Obama: Wave at the people, Joe.
Biden: IMMA POINT AT’EM
Obama: Please just wave.
Biden: pic.twitter.com/5Y6nuvCzcu
— Reverend Scott (@Reverend_Scott) November 29, 2014
Biden: can i put whoopee cushions under all the chairs before he gets here
Obama: joe im on the phone
Biden:*muttering* u didnt say not to pic.twitter.com/qfjh3ffkPE
— rudy mustang (@rudy_mustang) November 11, 2016
Actual Angry Obama
Keegan-Michael Key’s Obama Anger Translator was cute and all, but it could only go so far while Barack was still in office. I would give Netflix all my bank passwords to see Obama himself recreate certain interviews and real-life televised scenarios to respond how he really wanted to at the time. End of the day, Barack is a brother who’s spent plenty of time on the south side of Chicago, so I’m sure he’s got some colorful language that’ll make this program TV-MA. Essentially, I want to see Barack call Bill O’Reilly a “B—-made, playa hatin’-ass n—-.” That too much to ask?
Taken: The Malia Edition
Liam Neeson has had success making some variation of his 2008 film Taken about 4,892 times over the last decade. So why not get a version involving Obama and his eldest daughter Malia? Only here, Barack comes after those monkey-ass “friends” of Malia’s that allow video of her living her best teenaged life make it to YouTube. These (almost certainly white) people need to be stopped, and papa has just the set of tools and skills to make it happen – the Secret Service will disappear Tristan, Katie n’ ‘em forever before the closing credits.
The Trump Games
Before Barack and company passed the keys over to Trump, they left a series of deadly traps and obstacles in the White House. Trump and his staff have to use their wits to make it out alive, which pretty much guarantees they all die. Imagine The Hunger Games, only with more orange tan spray and unabashed bigotry. Tune in to see Ben Carson attempt to vault over a bed of poison-tipped spikes in the East Wing; stay to see Sarah Huckabee Sanders excoriated by a pond full of killer piranha.
The Reality of Life Before the White House
I’m sure you haven’t forgotten the eye-rolling frequency with which folks said, “You need to do like Michelle and get you a Barack” during their first term. Well, I want an honest depiction of what it was like for Michelle to live with and support with Barack’s ambitions while she was at the crib managing two babies on her own. Not so much the cutesy Southside With You angle – more like Malia-just-wrote-on-the-walls-with-permanent-marker-and-Sasha-is-projectile-vomiting-strained-peas With You. Michelle herself can do the voice-over, Everybody Hates Chris-style.
Dustin J. Seibert is a native Detroiter living in Chicago. Miraculously, people have paid him to be aggressively light-skinned via a computer keyboard for nearly two decades. He loves his own mama slightly more than he loves music and exercises every day only so his French fry intake doesn’t catch up to him. Find him at his own site, wafflecolored.com.