Adweek calls ABC’s The Mayor one of the must-watch new shows of the fall. The scripted comedy, which premieres tonight, is about a struggling rapper who runs for mayor of his town and surprisingly wins. It was created by a former TV newser Jeremy Bronson.
Bronson spent seven years as a TV news producer at MSNBC, including a stint as the supervising producer for Hardball with Chris Matthews. He would eventually move over to the entertainment side (he had been writing comedy even while at MSNBC), working on shows like The Mindy Project, Speechless and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon before embarking on The Mayor.
Adweek’s Jason Lynch sat down with Bronson to chat about the new show, and how his TV news background influenced the creative process:
Adweek: Had you tried to develop other politically-themed projects before?
Bronson: I’ve wanted to do a political show for awhile, and even when I was at Hardball, Chris Matthews has a tremendous reverence for people who play the game of politics very well. He’s actually pretty non-ideological, but people that are at least well-intentioned, and want to play the game well, he really admires. And that influenced the way I looked at it too. Looking for those personalities that can really move people to action, I was fascinated by it. I started thinking about different types of outsider candidates, and what the best version of that might look like, and one thing led to another.
Adweek: What’s your take on the cable news landscape now, especially in the past year?
Bronson: I’m obviously biased, because I spent many, many hours working in it, but I have a lot of appreciation and respect for people that work in most news media, and cable news. It’s a lot of young, super-hardworking people who are traveling a lot, and staying in hotels they don’t want to be in, and they do it for the love of the truth and a devotion to and reverence for this system of government that we have when it’s working at its best. So I don’t come to this show, or the news of it all, with a lot of cynicism. I really respect the people that work at it. Of course, there are bad apples, and those that miss big stories. But it’s a good thing that we have them.
Read the full interview over at Adweek.