When Netflix announced a production deal further enriching Barack and Michelle Obama in May, it was reported that “Obama's projects are not intended to address President Donald Trump or conservatives. Instead, it would focus on inspirational content.” But Deadline Hollywood revealed their first deal is to develop the Michael Lewis book The Fifth Risk as a potential series.
The Fifth Risk is a new best-seller, published October 2. The liberal author is obviously addressing the Trump administration, since it "details the chaos at the federal departments of Agriculture, Commerce and Energy in the transition from the Obama to Trump administrations." This is how the book is promoted by Amazon:
What are the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works?
"The election happened," remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the Department of Energy [and sister of ABC president Ben Sherwood]. "And then there was radio silence." Across all departments, similar stories were playing out: Trump appointees were few and far between; those that did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace. Some even threw away the briefing books that had been prepared for them.
Michael Lewis’s brilliant narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders...
Willful ignorance plays a role in these looming disasters. If your ambition is to maximize short-term gains without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing those costs. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. There is upside to ignorance, and downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.
Lewis announced the deal to Katie Couric on her podcast. He said the potential series is “a civics lesson…I did three departments, because it would be the work of many lifetimes to do the whole government, but you could do this in a fun way across the entire government.”
Fun, as in mocking conservatives as government-haters who ruin government, with their hatred.
Lewis is already in the Netflix camp: The streaming service snapped up his Wall Street reformers' book Flash Boys. Movie adaptations of his books led to a Best Screenplay Oscar for The Big Short and a Best Actress win for Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side.
