Showtime is set to tell a tale of the early days of President Donald Trump’s administration.
In November, the premium-cable network will premiere a two-episode miniseries based on former FBI director James Comey’s bestselling 2018 memoir, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. The series, The Comey Rule, stars Emmy winners Brendan Gleeson as President Trump and Jeff Daniels as Comey, and focuses on “the historically turbulent events surrounding the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath, which divided a nation,” according to a news release.
The series is written and directed by Billy Ray, who was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay for 2013’s Captain Phillips, based on the 2010 nonfiction book A Captain’s Duty by Richard Phillips with Stephan Talty. The cast also includes Oscar- and Golden Globe–winner Holly Hunter as former acting attorney general Sally Yates, House of Cards’ Michael Kelly as former FBI director Andrew McCabe, Peter Coyote as former special counsel Robert Mueller, and The OA’s Kingsley Ben-Adir as former President Barack Obama, among others.
Trump dismissed Comey from his post as FBI director in 2017. In A Higher Loyalty, Comey asserts that the president “demanded personal loyalty of Comey and did not receive the required affirmative reply,” in the words of Kirkus’ reviewer. The review notes that the author “weighs Trump and his colleagues and finds them wanting in every way: ‘this president is unethical,’ he charges, ‘and untethered to truth and institutional values.’ ”
McCabe became acting FBI director after Comey’s dismissal, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired him the following year; he published his own book, The Threat, in 2019.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
