by Frank Holmes, reporter
If there’s anybody who wishes she could live in an alternative reality the last four years, it’s former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Now, Hulu is paying her millions of dollars to give her that chance.
The streaming service is developing a new series asking what would have happened if Hillary never married Bill Clinton when the two met at Yale Law School in 1972.
Hulu plans to base the new series on Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Rodham, which its publisher describes as “a modern parable” about “feminism and why this country has such a complicated relationship to women in power.”
In other words, it bashes the United States for being too backwards to elect Hillary in 2016—which definitely turns reality on its head.
This show could also have a dystopian element, since it hired the executive producer of The Handmaid’s Tale—the series with the costume radical liberals liked to wear when they hurled unsubstantiated sexual assault charges against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
If the series makes it to the small screen, it will be Hulu’s second Hillary-themed project. It debuted the four-part miniseries Hillary, about her 2016 presidential campaign, in March.
It’s not clear that there has been an explosion of unmet demand for another series fantasizing about a Hillary Clinton presidency—or featuring the Clintons at all. Hulu’s previous series bombed so badly that a columnist for the liberal Daily Beast wondered who would bother watching.
A few minutes into the first episode, “amidst a widely-shared sense of Hillary fatigue…I wondered: Who is this thing even for?” she asked.
Backlash against the second helping of Hillary came quickly.
“Does Hulu stand for ‘Hillary’s Ultra Liberal Utopia?’” asked a blogger at RedState.com.
Other critics said Hillary’s future without Bill would be moot.
“Here’s the biggest difference we’d see in a world where Hillary Rodham never married Bill Clinton: We never would’ve heard of Hillary Rodham,” wrote Jim Treacher at PJMedia.com. “She is a uniquely charmless and unpleasant person, one of the worst politicians in living memory. Without Bill’s coat-tails to ride upon so luxuriously, she’d be lucky to get elected as the town dog-catcher.”
There is one undeniable fact: If the power couple never tied the knot in 1975, they wouldn’t have forged one of the largest financial empires in modern Democratic Party politics.
If she hadn’t married Bill Clinton, she’d have missed out on sharing the largest book advance up to that time. Knopf Publishing gave President Clinton $15 million to publish his 1,008-page autobiography, My Life.
That’s $22 million in today’s money, and still the second-biggest book payday of all time. (The company has never recovered the money.)
She also would have lost the opportunity to cash in on her two books; Her $8 million advance for Living History and her $14 million for Hard Choices rank in the top 10 book advances ever.
Her second book was a “bomb,” according to a veteran publisher.
“Sales were well below expectations and the media was a disaster,” an insider told conservative media on the condition of anonymity. “Between us, they are nervous at her publisher, Simon and Schuster.”
But the Clintons always seem to fail upward. Hillary Clinton joined forces with Hollywood powerhouse Steven Spielberg in 2018 to become “executive producer” of a made-for-TV project about women’s suffrage.
Like the new Hulu series, the financial pay-off was undisclosed.
If Bill and Hillary never married, they never would have had Chelsea Clinton, who got paid $600,000 from NBC News as a “special correspondent” who did little on the air.
Then again, the Clinton family could use the new Hulu payday. Donations to their family “charity,” the Clinton Foundation, have hit a 16-year low.
For some reason, their network of wealthy foreign donors have barely given one-tenth the amount of money they did in 2009, when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.
The tax-free Clinton nonprofit has lost almost $50 million since 2016, the year she lost the presidency.
But the alternative reality project might be an alternative reality itself. Right now, the series is in development state—meaning the studio only wants to review scripts. There’s no guarantee they’ll ever get shot or make it to Hulu.
Let us pray.
The new series proves one thing: Hillary Clinton can’t stop living a fantasy life.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”