President Curtis is a brilliant swipe at US exceptionalism and the impunity its leaders face
The Rick and Morty spin-off turns the presidency into a surreal workplace comedy, where cryptids, conspiracies and extraterrestrial crises are matters of national security
The actor Keith David has done it all. In his more than 400 screen credits he has battled The Thing, smoked a lot of dope with Charlie Sheen in Platoon, been murdered by alien-flung shrapnel in Nope and created my favourite ever comedy scene in the sitcom Community.
He’s also been president of the United States for 11 years in animated form on the sci-fi comedy Rick and Morty. Given that American politics remains in its darkest timeline, David is one of the more qualified and appealing candidates for the job.
He first appeared as the show’s unnamed commander-in-chief back in 2015. Now, more than a decade and several actual presidents later, the network Adult Swim has finally given his character his own show. The spin-off, President Curtis, turns Rick and Morty’s president into the centre of a surreal workplace comedy, where cryptids, conspiracies and extraterrestrial crises are all matters of everyday national security.
President Curtis follows Andre Curtis (David), the president’s new chief of staff and sort-of-cyborg Roe Banks (Stephanie Beatriz) and his part-leprechaun head of security Special Agent Francis O’Doyle (Jim Rash) as they investigate the Loch Ness monster, cover up a JFK-related CIA scandal, fight monstrous doppelgangers and generally do everything except run the country.
The show is a brilliant swipe at American exceptionalism and the lack of consequences its leaders face when they wreak global chaos. Even when the show is just being silly, it’s still an engaging, lurid hoot. David gives Curtis such magnificent, booming swagger that his velvety baritone carries even weaker jokes, while the writing has the loose, confident silliness you would expect from creator Dan Harmon, the complex, mercurial figure behind the magnificent (aside from Season 4) sitcom Community.
There is just one intriguing element of this satire of the American presidency — it entirely avoids any of the specifics of the present day leader.
That wasn’t always true of Curtis. Throughout Rick and Morty, he was a mirror to hold up to each specific time period. Curtis began in season two in 2015, on the truly perfect episode Get Shwifty, first resembling a swaggering Barack Obama. As the seasons went on and the character returned, he changed into an incompetent blow-hard akin to Trump in seasons four and five, then, a Bidenesque figure who was truly out of his depth in season six.
By season seven, when his spin-off was being developed, we got further under the hood of the fictional president, examining his love life and flashing back to his rise to power. So, now with his own series, Curtis is a beloved figure representing little more than his own established lore, rather than a parody of Trump 2.0.
Curtis’s diplomatic portfolio largely consists of creatures that may or may not exist, which is a bottomless well for a comedy and an even better way of avoiding almost everything the real life American president actually does.
There’s no war, occupation, client states or drone strikes. None of the long, ugly history of American “peacekeeping” tossed out as a casual punchline so often in US satire.
Often US television has plenty of room to laugh at the man behind the desk, but considerably less for the people living with the consequences of the nation’s power — and who, as a result, are disproportionately portrayed as perpetrators or victims of violence.
That has begun to change with shows such as Ramy, We Are Lady Parts and Mo, which find comedy in the specificity and mess of Muslim and minoritised lives, rather than orientalist shorthand.
President Curtis manages to avoid those old tropes, too, albeit through a stranger route — it more or less removes the rest of the world. Its extreme absurdism frees the sitcom from any obligation to tackle Gaza between Loch Ness jokes. It leaves us with a country whose greatest existential threats come from outer space or the bottom of a lake. Perhaps that says something about political parody in 2026 — that reality has become so indistinguishable from absurdity.
This may be the ultimate American fantasy: not a good president or even a competent one, but a president whose biggest foreign-policy problem can be solved by killing a sea monster.
President Curtis is streaming now on HBO Max.
