Robert and Michelle King | CBS | 13 episodes | 2016 | Political satire, science-fiction horror and black comedy. Spoilers throughout.
Washington Had a Problem Before the Aliens Arrived
There is something almost reassuring about a science-fiction story that explains political stupidity through an extraterrestrial invasion. It suggests that somewhere underneath the shouting, posturing and parliamentary manoeuvring, there might still be perfectly reasonable people waiting to be rescued. Remove the parasites, restore the missing portions of their brains, and perhaps everyone could return to the business of running a country without behaving like children fighting over the television remote.
That is essentially the premise of BrainDead, Robert and Michelle King’s wonderfully peculiar 2016 series in which alien insects crawl into people’s ears, eat portions of their brains and turn Washington politicians into fanatical versions of themselves. The disturbing part is that, for a surprising number of characters, nobody notices much difference. It is a joke with an obvious target, but the series gets considerably more mileage out of it than a brief description might suggest.
I have a soft spot for science fiction in which something profoundly unnatural invades an ordinary setting: a government office, a neighbourhood, a workplace or a perfectly respectable suburban home. The horror becomes more effective when people are still trying to answer telephones, finish reports and go home at the end of the day. BrainDead belongs to the tradition of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but moves the invasion into a place where disagreement is already treated as evidence of something sinister. Watching it a decade later, the uncomfortable part is not how far-fetched its politics have become, but how recognisable many of the symptoms remain.
A Documentary Filmmaker Walks Into a Government Shutdown
Laurel Healy, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, wants to make documentary films. Unfortunately, wanting to make documentaries and being able to finance them are two different things. She returns to Washington to work for her brother, Democratic senator Luke Healy (Danny Pino), partly because her politically connected family can help fund her next project. It is not exactly her dream career move, and she regards political life with the weary suspicion of someone who has spent enough time around it to recognise the smell.
Luke is no uncomplicated public servant. He compromises, manages scandals, hides aspects of his personal life and expects the people around him to understand the odd rules governing political survival. Laurel enters his office during a government shutdown and discovers that almost everybody seems busy accomplishing very little. Before long, however, the dysfunction acquires a biological explanation. A meteorite has brought alien insects to Earth, and those insects have found the most promising possible habitat: the brains of American politicians.
Instead of producing obedient, expressionless duplicates, the creatures turn people into exaggerated versions of themselves. A stubborn politician becomes incapable of compromise, while a partisan develops something approaching religious certainty. Behaviour that might ordinarily be dismissed as arrogance becomes evidence of a much wider infestation. There are also more physical manifestations of the problem, including grotesque eruptions and, on occasion, exploding heads. It is difficult to maintain the dignity of a Senate hearing when someone’s skull has just suffered a catastrophic structural failure.
Laurel Healy, or the Last Person Still Asking Questions
Winstead is an excellent choice for this sort of nonsense because she remains believable when the world around her stops making sense. Laurel is curious rather than superhuman, and she investigates events because she refuses to accept the convenient explanations offered by people with more authority. She follows clues, gets things wrong, returns to the evidence and eventually assembles a theory so ridiculous that she would probably have rejected it herself a few weeks earlier.
I like that Laurel never transforms into a conventional action heroine. Her tools are observation, persistence and the willingness to listen to people who appear eccentric or unimportant. That feels appropriate for somebody who wanted to become a documentary filmmaker. She is interested in what people actually do, rather than accepting the official description of what they do. Her career may have taken a strange detour, but those instincts prove unexpectedly useful in saving civilisation.
Red Wheatus and the Advantages of Losing Half Your Brain
Senator Raymond “Red” Wheatus is the series’ great comic creation. Tony Shalhoub plays him as a jaded Republican who has more or less lost interest in his job, preferring drink, women and the comforts of political seniority. Once the parasites invade, however, he experiences what he might reasonably consider a professional revival. He becomes energetic, disciplined, relentlessly confident and entirely uninterested in compromise. The missing brain tissue appears to have made him a considerably more effective politician.
Shalhoub is marvellous at making this simultaneously funny and threatening. Red’s new enthusiasm has the quality of a salesman who has learned that the customer cannot escape. His convictions no longer require evidence or adjustment, and his opponents exist largely to be beaten. The insects have removed some of the equipment necessary for reasonable judgment while preserving the habits that allow him to dominate an argument. There is an uncomfortable joke here about the qualities that can be mistaken for political leadership.
What gives the character more depth is the suggestion that Red was already capable of cruelty and hypocrisy before the infection. His history with Lana, a woman he once loved but betrayed for ideological reasons, becomes more important than another partisan confrontation. The problem is not simply that an insect has taken something away from him. His old willingness to sacrifice human feelings for political certainty provided fertile ground in the first place.
Gareth Ritter: A Republican Who Still Knows How to Listen
Aaron Tveit’s Gareth Ritter initially appears designed to become Laurel’s ideological opposite. He is Red’s hardworking legislative director, a Republican with genuine professional principles and a considerably better understanding of Washington’s internal machinery than Laurel possesses. He recognises that his boss is changing, but his professional loyalties make the prospect of acting on that recognition more complicated than it appears from the outside.
Laurel and Gareth’s disagreements are real, but they develop an affection that depends upon arguing without assuming the other person is morally defective. The romance can be awkward and occasionally it holds up the science-fiction investigation more than it should. Yet it also represents the programme’s clearest statement about political disagreement. They are not converted into identical thinkers, and their differences are not magically resolved by attraction. They simply remain curious enough about one another to discover the human being beneath the party affiliation. In this particular Washington, that qualifies as a mildly revolutionary act.
Rochelle, Gustav and the People Who Actually Investigate Things
The investigation becomes considerably more entertaining when Laurel joins forces with Rochelle Daudier (Nikki M. James) and Gustav Triplett (Johnny Ray Gill). Rochelle brings medical knowledge, scepticism and the discipline required to test an increasingly outrageous hypothesis. Her motivation is personal, following her father’s death. Gustav, meanwhile, is an obsessive conspiracy theorist whose tendency to distrust institutions would ordinarily make me cross to the other side of the street. The joke is that he is substantially correct.
Their partnership works because Gustav notices details conventional investigators might discard, while Rochelle insists on evidence before declaring another theory proven. Neither approach is entirely sufficient by itself. The series’ best investigative scenes understand that curiosity and method are more valuable together than separately, and the tests they devise are an entertaining mixture of improvised science and desperate pest control. There is something pleasing about a show in which the people keeping civilisation intact are the ones prepared to admit they may have made a mistake.
Congress, Family Affairs and a Senator Named Ella
Jan Maxwell’s Senator Ella Pollack provides a useful counterpart to Red Wheatus. Her infection demonstrates that the alien threat is not confined to a single political party, and her eventual rivalry with Red begins to resemble a turf war between alien factions as much as a debate about legislation. Danny Pino’s Luke, meanwhile, embodies the difference between ordinary human weakness and actual possession. He can be slippery, ambitious and deeply frustrating, but remains capable of changing course. Zach Grenier’s Dean Healy supplies the controlling family patriarch, Paige Patterson’s Scarlett Pierce adds personal scandal, and Charlie Semine’s FBI agent Anthony Onofrio offers what initially looks like a more conventional route through the mystery.
Television commentators help reinforce the wider atmosphere of mutual suspicion, illustrating that the creatures do not necessarily need to control an entire population. A handful of influential voices broadcasting satisfying opinions to people who already agree with them can accomplish a great deal. It is one of the show’s sharper observations, and it does not require particularly elaborate alien biology to work.
The Cars, Jonathan Coulton and an Earworm That Won’t Leave
For me, one of the cleverest decisions in BrainDead is its use of music. The infected characters repeatedly listen to “You Might Think”, The Cars’ 1984 hit from Heartbeat City. It is an inspired choice because the song is bright, insistent and almost aggressively catchy, the sort of record that gets into your head without asking permission. As someone who remembers that era of pop music, when synthesiser-driven rock and extravagant music videos regularly accompanied perfectly peculiar lyrics, I find the transformation particularly enjoyable. Here, something so cheerful becomes an audible sign that a person’s brain may no longer be entirely their own.
Then there are Jonathan Coulton’s musical recaps, a running joke that develops into one of the programme’s defining pleasures. Rather than simply replaying scenes under a conventional “previously on” voiceover, Coulton writes and performs increasingly elaborate miniature songs explaining what happened in the preceding episodes. Congressional terminology, personal scandals, alien biology and exploding heads are all cheerfully squeezed into rhyming verses. It is a clever formal choice because the recaps acknowledge how much nonsense the writers are getting away with, without asking us to stop taking the characters seriously.
At one point the recap more or less gives up on the immediate storyline and turns its attention to Gunsmoke, a beautifully unreasonable admission that summarising the events of BrainDead has become an exhausting business. Another plays with the language of a pharmaceutical advertisement. The Kings and Coulton give the impression of people who have been offered a network television slot and have decided to use at least part of it to see how far they can stretch an already elastic concept. I wish more television had that kind of nerve.
Production Design: Respectable Rooms and Very Unrespectable Biology
Visually, BrainDead is rather more restrained than the premise initially suggests. Its corridors, committee rooms, offices and apartments are recognisably ordinary, even slightly bland. That is part of the joke. The most improbable events in the series unfold amid the architecture of institutional respectability: clean desks, neutral conference rooms, polished surfaces and the little television monitors carrying a constant procession of competing political opinions. The world looks like a serious Washington drama until somebody’s ear begins doing something no ear should do.
The invading organisms themselves are hardly elaborate monsters. They are tiny, ant-like insects whose ability to remain unnoticed makes them considerably more effective than the usual giant extraterrestrial threat. A small movement beneath the skin or an insect emerging from a person’s ear is unnerving precisely because it happens in such familiar surroundings. The show occasionally punctures this restraint with full-blown body horror, including spectacular exploding heads, treating grotesque biological disaster with the timing of an old-fashioned slapstick joke.
The production belongs to the Kings’ television world, with its taste for institutional interiors and conversations in which professional decorum conceals absolute panic. Ridley Scott was among the executive producers, and the series was sold as a mixture of political drama and horror, a description that sounds awkward on paper but makes sense once its visual restraint becomes apparent. It does not need vast spaceships or endless computer-generated destruction. Its budget is more usefully spent suggesting that something tiny and wrong is operating inside a perfectly ordinary office.
The Body Snatchers Return, Wearing Better Suits
The obvious ancestors are Don Siegel’s 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Philip Kaufman’s 1978 reinterpretation. Both films explore the possibility that a familiar person can become fundamentally different without looking any different at all. The body-snatcher story has often been read through the ideological anxieties of its time, including conformity, Cold War paranoia and the loss of individual identity. BrainDead updates that anxiety for a world dominated by constant news coverage and increasingly inflexible political identities.
There is a significant variation in the way these creatures operate. The people possessed by the insects do not simply lose their personalities: they become exaggerated versions of what they already were. A moderately stubborn politician becomes immovable; a committed partisan becomes fanatical; someone inclined to distrust opponents starts interpreting every disagreement as confirmation of a conspiracy. The parasites exploit existing weaknesses rather than inventing new personalities, and the transformation can be difficult to identify because everybody already behaves so strangely.
The cultural timing was almost impossibly neat. BrainDead premiered during the American presidential election of 2016, although the Kings developed the premise against an earlier background of government shutdowns and legislative gridlock. They described the original hybrid as something like The West Wing meeting The Strain. What seemed like a pointed exaggeration quickly became a different kind of joke as reality began supplying political scenes that would have looked implausible in a conventional drama. It must be an odd experience for a satirist to discover that ordinary headlines have become a more ambitious rival.
The Finale: Shame, Cherry Blossoms and an Unfortunate Gunshot
By the final episodes, the alien infestation has developed a plan considerably more ambitious than simply manipulating a few senators. Washington’s cherry blossoms become central to the creatures’ intentions, and the agricultural provisions buried inside a congressional budget turn out to have a purpose rather different from anything the public might reasonably expect. Their proposed facilities would help cultivate and distribute the organisms, giving the invasion a much larger foothold. Hiding the end of civilisation inside an enormous piece of legislation is a splendidly plausible joke, largely because virtually nobody has the patience to read the thing.
Luke attempts to obstruct the plan through Senate procedure, while Laurel and her allies uncover something more fundamental about the parasites. The creatures have difficulty with strong, contradictory human emotions, especially guilt and shame. A host who has to acknowledge the distance between their cherished self-image and their actual behaviour becomes a less comfortable home. It is an unexpectedly thoughtful weakness to give an extraterrestrial organism: the alien equivalent of a system that simply cannot process the sentence “I was wrong”.
Laurel confronts her father about painful family experiences and the ways he has treated Luke, encouraging him to recognise a truth that doesn’t fit his own tidy version of events. The same approach is attempted with Red Wheatus, whose history with Lana reveals the gap between his professed principles and the way he behaved towards somebody he once loved. These confrontations are more interesting than another scientific gadget or military solution because they make the characters’ moral failures part of the plot rather than merely decoration.
The ultimate showdown is, appropriately, completely ridiculous. Red is shot in the backside, the queen insect escapes from his head, and an unfortunate intern steps on it. After thirteen episodes of congressional intrigue, alien science and physical horror, the immediate invasion is defeated by a mixture of human remorse, bad timing and thoroughly undignified pest control. The other insects abandon their hosts and swarm towards their fallen queen as the wider scheme collapses.
Laurel and Gareth commit to a relationship, Luke carries on with his imperfect career, and Jonathan Coulton returns to deliver an amusing musical epilogue. Red Wheatus survives and remains part of political life despite having lost a substantial portion of his brain, because the programme has never seriously suggested that a fully functioning one is a professional requirement. A surviving alien insect offers the possibility of more trouble, but the series provides enough closure for its one season to stand on its own.
Four Seasons That Never Happened
One of the more frustrating pieces of production history is that Robert and Michelle King had a four-season structure in mind. Washington would be followed by Wall Street, Silicon Valley and finally Hollywood, with each new setting allowing the infestation to expose a different institution’s characteristic weaknesses. Financial greed, technological evangelism and the peculiar priorities of the entertainment industry all seem wonderfully hospitable to creatures that thrive by amplifying whatever irrational convictions a person already possesses.
That larger plan was never realised. CBS cancelled BrainDead in October 2016, after its first thirteen episodes and disappointing audience figures. It had been commissioned as a straight-to-series order for summer 2016, with Ridley Scott among its executive producers, but the mixture of comedy, horror, romance and pointed political commentary was never the simplest proposition for a general network audience. It is possible to admire the show’s refusal to fit into an obvious genre and still understand why marketing departments might have found the whole thing rather exhausting.
The cancellation was announced on 17 October 2016, making this look back particularly well timed a decade later. I would have liked to see the Wall Street season, and the idea of Hollywood falling prey to the insects has its own appeal. Perhaps the unmade seasons would have become repetitive, or perhaps the Kings would have found entirely different kinds of satire within those institutions. The frustrating thing about a cancelled programme is that neither possibility can ever be tested.
What Works, and What Doesn’t
I don’t think BrainDead is consistently successful. It takes time to find its rhythm, some secondary characters are more useful as representatives of political ideas than as complicated human beings, and the science-fiction rules occasionally seem invented to solve the needs of whichever episode comes next. The romance can hold up the investigation, the satire is sometimes broad, and the effort to make partisan excess look neatly distributed across every political faction can feel more convenient than convincing.
There is also a conceptual limitation built into the premise. By attributing extremism to alien interference, the series risks making ordinary human beings seem more reasonable than history suggests they really are. Institutions do not need extraterrestrial assistance to encourage careerism, arrogance or the refusal to consider contrary evidence. The show is strongest when it recognises that the creatures are merely exploiting familiar failings, and weaker when it uses possession as an all-purpose explanation for otherwise complicated political behaviour.
Yet its better qualities are unusually distinctive. Winstead keeps the absurdity grounded, Shalhoub makes the antagonist a pleasure to watch, Rochelle and Gustav bring genuine intelligence to the investigation, and Coulton gives the whole production a voice unlike anything else in mainstream American television at the time. Some strange programmes might improve with polish; others would lose the very thing that makes them worth remembering. This feels like one of the latter, its eccentricity inseparable from both its failures and its pleasures.
We Didn’t Need the Bugs After All
Ten years on, what stays with me about BrainDead is not simply the insects or the exploding heads, but the suggestion that the most effective manipulation doesn’t require convincing somebody of an entirely new idea. Sometimes it is enough to take an existing belief and remove the ability to question it. The infected characters become certain about everything. They stop noticing contradictions, stop listening and begin treating the mildest disagreement as evidence of a much wider threat.
The people who eventually save Washington are not necessarily those with the greatest influence. They are the people who remain willing to ask questions, change their minds, test a theory or acknowledge that they have behaved badly. Laurel survives because she observes rather than assumes; Gareth becomes useful because he can think beyond party loyalty; Rochelle and Gustav succeed because they are willing to correct one another. The finale places guilt and compassion at the heart of its solution, which is quite a humanistic idea for a programme so fond of spraying bits of people around the room.
I would have liked another season, particularly the proposed Wall Street storyline, but perhaps BrainDead is better remembered as a peculiar thirteen-episode experiment that arrived at exactly the moment when satire began finding itself in competition with the daily news. The bugs were defeated, but the conditions that made their invasion so effective never entirely went away. Somewhere in the background, I can almost hear The Cars playing again.
Production Notes and Further Reading
For the original production announcement and the Kings’ description of the concept as a cross between political drama and genre horror, see CBS’s 2015 commission announcement. The creators’ proposed four-season progression is discussed in their Broadcasting & Cable interview, while Paramount’s series listing provides the cast and official description. The musical recaps are explored in TV Guide’s conversation with Jonathan Coulton.
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