Hulu's 'Rodham' Series: What If Hillary Never Married Bill?

Alternative history stories have been a staple of science fiction for decades, and they can make for some entertaining television. You’ve got Amazon Prime’s The Man in the High Castle, which depicts a version of the 1960s in which the Nazis and the Japanese won WWII and have divvied up the United States.* HBO’s The Plot Against America is set in an alternate 1940s in which Charles Lindbergh is elected president and becomes an anti-Semitic fascist. And everybody loves The West Wing, which shows us a fantasy world where a Democrat was elected POTUS in the ’90s and did a really good job and never even thought about banging an intern.

Now there’s a new show for the “liberal, but still embarrassed by Bill Clinton” demographic. And it features America’s favorite runner-up!

Joe Otterson, Variety:

Hulu has optioned the rights to Curtis Sittenfeld’s alternative history book “Rodham,” which takes place in a world in which Hillary Rodham never married Bill Clinton.

The series is described as telling the story of an ambitious young woman, developing her extraordinary mind in the latter part of the 20th century, moving from idealism to cynicism and all the way back again…

The streamer debuted the four-part docuseries “Hillary” back in March. That series chronicled her 2016 presidential campaign while also delving into events from her past that shaped her life.

Dems can’t deal with reality, but they’re terrific at weaving fantasy.

Here’s the biggest difference we’d see in a world where Hillary Rodham never married Bill Clinton: We never would’ve heard of Hillary Rodham. It’s absolutely ridiculous to imagine that she’d ever get where she is now, or anywhere near it, under her own power. She is a uniquely charmless and unpleasant person, one of the worst politicians in living memory. Without Bill’s coat-tails to ride upon so luxuriously, she’d be lucky to get elected as the town dog-catcher. She makes Joe Biden look competent. She makes Nancy Pelosi seem warm and cuddly.

That’s not even taking into account all the political disasters she’s overseen, where telling the truth would’ve saved her a lot of trouble but she just couldn’t do it. Remember this one?

Then she got angry at the people who pointed out her blatantly obvious lies. She’s just so awful.

I mean, she lost to Donald Trump. She stayed with Bill after he cheated on her again and again. She abandoned all her feminist principles to cover up his philandering. She enabled his sexual predation because she needed his personal charm and political power. She used him to claw herself 99.9% of the way to the White House, and then she was thwarted at the last minute by those pesky, deplorable voters. Even if you like Trump, you gotta admit that it doesn’t reflect well on her. The election was hers to lose, and oh my goodness, did she ever.**

Which is why this Hulu show is happening, of course. The 2016 election drove the media and other Democrats completely out of their minds, their hearts are still broken after almost four years, and watching stuff like this is their only consolation.

Can you blame ’em? They’ve spent the past 1,280 days trying and failing to get rid of Trump, and now their only hope is a 77-year-old dimwit whose biggest accomplishment in life is serving as Obama’s VP for eight years without openly saying the N-word. No wonder they’re turning to science fiction for solace.

*The book is better. I haven’t read The Plot Against America, but it’s probably better than that show. The book is almost always better.

**I know you know this already, but it’s still fun to talk about after all these years. Only the most diehard Hillary fans can’t enjoy some sweet sweet schadenfreude at her expense. She has more than earned it. If she still won’t shut up about losing, at least we can enjoy her ongoing self-imposed humiliation.