Tribune. “Show me a Hero and I’ll Write You has tragedy” (“Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy”). This word of the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) has a strange news with the emergence of a television serial actor, Volodymyr Zelensky, hero of the servant series of the people (2025-2019) where he embodies an ordinary man, Vassili Goloborodko, a history-geo professor, accessing a little by accident to the presidency of Ukraine, and who in 2019, at the time of the 3 e season of his series, “realizes” this scenario. Carried by a political party that bears the very name of the series, it is then actually elected president of his country.
This is obviously not the first time a TV series joins the real. The TV series now have such a place in the lives of the spectators they are, not only according to the speech “a mirror of society”, but also act on the world, precisely by this serial mode of the attachment to the attachment. Hero identified with the actor.
We remember that actor Martin Sheen, who embodied the mythical President Bartlet in the classic The West Wing, was so popular in 2000 that a NBC survey put him far from George W. Bush and Al Gore for the presidential election .
The Series Cult 24 Hours Chrono, of which each episode of the season tells one hour of the life of an anti-terrorism agent, started the next day of September 11 [2001], while it had been programmed and filmed well before . The Handmaid’s Tale anticipated the formidable attacks of the Trump Presidency against women’s rights. Casa de Papel has offered words and sounds to mobilizations in recent years. Homeland, in his season 5 written in 2014, staged European jihadist cells and was broadcast in France during the attacks of November 2015.
The role of his life
Chernobyl today must be reviewed, while nuclear power plants are bombarded in Ukraine and no longer meet the phone; and the splendid seasons 4 and 5 of the legend office, under Russian footprint.
But actor Martin Sheen has never been president of the United States, nor the excellent Dennis Haysbert, even if he has used his audience to a black president by premonitially incarnating David Palmer in 24 hours.
Zelensky, he became the “Showrunner” of the destiny of Ukraine. Never the impact of a series on real life was also direct. It is also remarkable that servant of the people be a Ukrainian production, clearly highlighting the globalization of series production. It is a non-American series that offered the future Ukrainian president the role of his life and saw him move from the “soft power” to power, even if the servant of the people is soaked in American democratic culture.
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