Welcome to the April A to Z Blogging Challenge! Every year, bloggers from around the world commit to posting every day in April (except Sundays), working through the alphabet one letter at a time. This year, I’m visiting twenty-six fictional alternate Earths — worlds that diverged from our own at some crucial moment and became something wonderfully, unsettlingly different. Think of it like the TV show Sliders, which followed a group of travelers “sliding” between parallel dimensions, never quite knowing what version of Earth they’d land on next. Each day, we visit a new one. Today: T.

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The World That Votes for Its Favorite

There is a man named Dale Prentiss who has been the frontrunner for President of the United States for eleven weeks now, and his approval ratings just took a hit because, during last Tuesday’s episode, he forgot to congratulate a rival candidate on her immunity win before voting her off. Pundits are calling it tone-deaf. His campaign manager is calling it a “momentum reset opportunity.” The network is calling it the most-watched episode of the season.

Welcome to Television Presidency Earth, where democracy didn’t die — it just got better lighting and a theme song.

How It Started: The Slow Boil

Nobody woke up one morning and decided to replace elections with television. That is the thing that makes Television Presidency Earth so disquieting when you study its history: there was no coup, no constitutional crisis, no singular villain who looked into a camera and said what if we made this a show? There was only a very long slide, greased by ratings and public indifference, and nobody thought to put their foot down until the slide had become the floor.

It started, as most things in this particular alternate history started, with Ronald Reagan.

In 1980, on both our Earth and this one, Reagan was a former actor running for President. On our Earth, that fact was treated as a vague eccentricity. On Television Presidency Earth, network executives noticed something different: Reagan’s debate performances were pulling in numbers. The 1980 Carter-Reagan debate drew a domestic audience of 80 million viewers — bigger than the finale of M*A*S*H. Bigger than the Super Bowl. NBC’s internal memo, later leaked and now infamous in the media studies departments of this alternate world, read: We are airing the most-watched program in television history and we don’t have a single ad slot in the second hour. This cannot happen again.

It didn’t. By the 1984 election cycle, all three major networks had negotiated formal broadcast partnerships with the two major parties. The debates were restructured with commercial breaks. Producers were brought in to consult on “presentation.” Lighting was upgraded. Candidates were coached — not just on policy, but on how to pause for effect, how to wear makeup under studio lights, how to deliver a one-liner that would lead the eleven o’clock news.

None of this was sinister, exactly. It was just television being television.

The 1988 election was the first one covered as what the networks called an “ongoing narrative” — a serialized story about the race, with weekly recap specials, profile pieces edited like character introductions, and, for the first time, viewer call-in segments where the public could weigh in on who had “won the week.” The call-in numbers were not binding. They were just interesting. And the candidates who won them, researchers later noted, won their primaries at a rate of about 74 percent.

By 1992, the primaries had been restructured — at the formal request of the Democratic National Committee, which had studied those 1988 numbers very carefully — into what was called the Primary Showcase: a twelve-week broadcast series in which candidates competed in structured challenges and debate formats, with weekly viewer voting determining which candidates received the most media coverage and fundraising exposure for the following week. The votes were advisory. The results were, in practice, definitive.

The Constitutional amendment that made it official — Amendment XXVIII, ratified in February of 1996 — was less a revolution than a formality. By the time it passed, the television primary had been functionally selecting presidents for two cycles. The amendment simply acknowledged what was already true, added some regulatory language about equal broadcast access, and established the Federal Election Entertainment Commission to oversee what it carefully described as “democratic engagement programming.”

The FEEC’s founding chairman was a former NBC programming executive named Harold Bryce. He served for twelve years. He is remembered, on Television Presidency Earth, the way our world remembers certain constitutional framers: necessary, pragmatic, occasionally ruthless, and impossible to fully evaluate from the inside of what he built.

The Show: American Leader

The flagship program is called American Leader, and it has been running continuously since 1996. It airs on NBC in its current contract cycle, though the broadcast rights have moved three times and are renegotiated every eight years in a separate competitive process that is itself covered extensively by entertainment media.

The format has evolved considerably since its first season, but the basic structure has been stable for about two decades: eighteen candidates enter the competition in January of the election year. They are drawn from a pool of registered contenders — any citizen meeting the constitutional age and residency requirements can apply, subject to a vetting process managed jointly by the FEEC and the network’s standards division. In practice, the candidates with prior political experience, name recognition, or existing media profiles make it to air. In theory, anyone can.

The season runs for twenty-two episodes. The first twelve are the “open field” phase: candidates compete in weekly challenges — policy debates, crisis simulations, town hall formats, and what the show calls “character rounds,” which include everything from community service showcases to the deeply controversial “personal revelation episodes” in which candidates share aspects of their private lives. An independent polling firm conducts national voting after each episode. The three candidates with the lowest cumulative scores each week are placed in a “consideration zone,” from which the viewing public votes to eliminate one.

The final six candidates enter the “Alliance Phase,” which is where it gets genuinely strange. Candidates can form and dissolve alliances with each other. They can pool polling resources, agree to speak favorably of each other in interviews, and — in the mechanism that produces the most drama and the most political analysis — vote amongst themselves to eliminate one of their number each week, subject to a public override if the home audience disagrees by a margin of more than twenty percentage points.

The finale is a live three-hour broadcast in which the final two candidates make their case directly to the viewing public, who vote by phone, text, and a national online portal over the following forty-eight hours. The winner is announced in a live results special. The loser gives a concession speech that is, by tradition, delivered on the American Leader stage rather than a campaign office or hotel ballroom.

The show’s current host is Ryan Seacrest, who has hosted since 2012 and is the third person to hold the job, following in the footsteps of Dick Clark and Regis Philbin. The host does not vote, does not editorialize publicly, and is contractually prohibited from making political donations. He is also, according to every available polling metric, the third-most trusted figure in American public life, after the sitting President and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

What Governance Looks Like

You might assume that a President selected by reality television would govern like one, and you would be — depending on the specific President in question — sometimes right.

The structure of government on Television Presidency Earth is not dramatically different from our own. The three branches still exist. Congress still passes laws. The Supreme Court still interprets them. The President still commands the armed forces and conducts foreign policy and signs or vetoes legislation.

What is different is the rhythm. Everything is episodic.

The State of the Union, once a somewhat dry annual address, is now a two-hour broadcast event with a formal viewership goal and a post-show analysis program featuring a panel of political commentators, three former Presidents, and a rotating “citizen respondent” selected from the general public. The address itself is scripted — not in the sense of being fake, but in the sense that it is written, reviewed, timed, and structured by a team that includes both policy staff and professional television writers whose specific job is narrative clarity and audience retention.

Policy rollouts are announced in phases that correspond to media cycles. If a major piece of legislation is being developed, the White House communications team will plan a six-to-eight week “story arc” — their term, used without apparent irony in official memos — that builds public understanding and enthusiasm for the policy before the formal announcement. Town halls are scheduled like episodes. Cabinet meetings that used to be entirely private now have abbreviated versions released as edited video to the official government media channels, because a President who seemed to be governing in secret was eliminated in the 2008 primary season and nobody forgot the lesson.

The strangest outcome, and the one that most surprises visitors from our Earth, is this: the Presidents of Television Presidency Earth are, on average, quite good at communicating with the public. They have been selected, across six election cycles, by a process that relentlessly rewards clarity, likability, and the ability to explain complicated ideas in terms a general audience can follow. The Presidents are not, as a result, always the most experienced or most technically qualified individuals. But they are, almost without exception, extraordinarily good at talking to people.

Whether that is a feature or a bug depends considerably on what you think governing is for.

What the Citizens Think

The voting participation rate on Television Presidency Earth is 78 percent, the highest of any major democracy in this alternate timeline. Researchers attribute this, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to the same forces that made American Leader a ratings institution: people follow the story, they develop preferences, they feel invested in the outcome.

What is also true is that the citizens of Television Presidency Earth relate to their Presidents the way fans relate to characters. There is a parasocial intensity to presidential approval ratings that would be familiar to anyone who has ever been deeply invested in a television drama and found themselves unable to explain exactly when that happened. People know the President’s verbal tics, their favorite phrases, the look they get when they’re trying not to show they’re annoyed. They know this because they watched the whole season. They voted. This is, in a very literal sense, their show.

The downside — and there is always a downside — is that the same dynamic that makes fans loyal makes them tribal. Presidential fandom on Television Presidency Earth functions exactly like sports fandom on ours: passionate, sometimes irrational, and extremely reluctant to update based on new information. The man who voted for Dale Prentiss in the semifinal is not going to turn on him because of a lapse in on-camera graciousness. The woman who has been Team Prentiss since episode four is going to interpret every negative news story about him as network interference.

The phrase “plot armor” entered political discourse in this timeline in approximately 2016 and has not left.

How the Rest of the World Reacts

The international response to Television Presidency Earth’s electoral system has passed through several distinct phases.

The initial phase — roughly 1996 through 2008 — was horror. Traditional American allies treated the new system as a geopolitical embarrassment, the democratic equivalent of showing up to a state dinner in a novelty hat. European foreign ministers gave interviews using phrases like “the trivializing of democratic norms” and “cause for grave concern.” There were academic papers. There were UN statements. There was a period in which attending a G7 summit with the American President felt, to some European heads of state, like being required to take seriously someone they had watched lose a cooking challenge on television the previous spring.

The second phase — roughly 2008 through 2016 — was reluctant normalization. The Presidents kept arriving. They kept knowing what they were talking about. They were, irritatingly, easier to deal with in bilateral meetings than many of their predecessors had been — clearer communicators, quicker to find common ground in conversation, less inclined to stonewalling and more inclined to the sort of collaborative problem-solving that reads well in extended negotiation. You could disagree with their policies and still find yourself thinking this person is quite good at this, which was a confusing experience when you had watched them win a challenge round involving a pie-eating contest three months earlier.

The third phase — the current one — is something like competitive anxiety. Several democracies have begun experimenting with “engagement-based” electoral formats of their own. The UK has a hybrid model involving both traditional constituency voting and a nationally televised leadership tournament. France’s version — Le Choix de la République — premiered in 2022 to ratings that have not been released but are described, by everyone involved, as “significant.” Japan’s experiment was cancelled after two episodes and is not discussed publicly.

The Mirror and What It Shows

Television Presidency Earth did not happen because its people were shallow, or because they stopped caring about democracy. It happened because they cared about television, and then they cared about both at the same time, and over the course of about fifteen years those two things became indistinguishable.

The question its political philosophers argue about — in the journals that have replaced traditional op-ed pages, and on the policy podcast that is itself formatted like a competition program and has been running for eight years — is whether what they have is democracy or the aesthetic of democracy. The voting is real. The stakes are real. The President who emerges from American Leader will command nuclear weapons and negotiate treaties and make decisions that affect millions of lives, and the show’s twenty-two-episode season is not entirely a bad way to evaluate someone’s fitness for that role. You do learn things, watching a person navigate pressure for five months in front of a national audience. You do see who they are.

You also see who they perform.

The candidates who make it to the finale are, without exception, extraordinary performers. They have survived twenty-two weeks of sustained public scrutiny, strategic alliance-building, and challenge formats designed specifically to reveal character flaws under stress. What they have also done, for twenty-two weeks, is manage their image. They have learned, with professional coaching, exactly how to seem authentic. They have A/B tested their vulnerability. They have figured out which of their genuine traits plays well and which ones need to be kept off-camera, and they have acted accordingly, and the result is a kind of optimized sincerity that is genuinely difficult to distinguish from the unoptimized kind.

Dale Prentiss, currently polling at 61 percent with four episodes left in the season, is probably a good person. The production team’s background research suggests as much, and it’s extensive research. He is also a man who has spent eleven weeks performing being Dale Prentiss for a national audience that votes on whether he gets to continue existing in the race, and something in that process has made him — as it makes all of them — slightly too smooth, slightly too aware of the camera’s location, slightly too good at pausing in exactly the right place.

He forgot to congratulate his rival. It was a human moment. His numbers dropped four points in forty-eight hours, because on Television Presidency Earth, human moments are also content.

The show will go on. It always does.

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Join me tomorrow for U — and another world waiting just beyond the edge of what we know.