The announcement of a reality show about Clay Aiken’s failed Congressional bid sounded just like an extra riff on the jokes made about the political ambition of the “American Idol” runner-up.
But the Esquire network’s “The Runner Up” in a brief glimpse at the TV Critics Association winter press tour, looks like an intriguing documentary series that looks beyond his singing celebrity to the nature of modern politics and the difficulties of any Democrat in his conservative North Carolina district, let alone one who is a gay single dad.
It’s produced by Simon Chinn, the Oscar-winning producer of “Man on Wire” and “Searching for Sugar Man,” along with his cousin Jonathan Chinn who produced “30 Days” for FX and “American High” for PBS.
“This film, I think, follows in a sort of rich tradition of, first of all, documentaries but also political campaign documentaries going all the way back to ‘Primary’ about the Kennedy brothers and the crisis with integrating the schools, all the way through ‘The War Room’ and more recently ‘Mitt,” said Jonathan Chinn.
“We approach this very similarly,” he said. “We had a very small crew. Almost always it was a single camera, maybe three people who were visible. One of our goals was to impact the campaign as little as possible. It was very important to us as documentarians and, I think, something that Clay and his campaign team, when they were agreeing to do it or considering to agree to do it, were very clear about, that they didn’t want the filming to interrupt the important work they had to do to win an election.”
“It has to be said we had more limited access to Clay’s opponent’s campaign,”Simon Chinn said. “So I guess that drove some of our editorial choices. And so what you end up seeing is a series that’s very much focused on Clay and his campaign team, and Clay’s point of view about his campaign.”
It wasn’t an easy race, Aiken says. “It’s a very difficult district, and one of the things that I hope we’re able to shed some light on as I talk about running for Congress is the political climate in the country now and how so many of the districts that we have in this country are gerrymandered beyond recognition.”
His own district lines “looks like an amoeba of some kind,” he says. “We’ve gerrymandered districts in ways that have not only made seats less winnable for people, but they’ve allowed our country to become so polarized, because the only people who can win are people who play to the far fringes. I don’t want to believe that it’s unwinnable, because if someone doesn’t run, then we don’t have the opportunity to make that change. So I like to believe that all races are winnable if you get your message out there.”
Despite the election’s outcome, Aiken says, “I don’t think that I would have changed anything. I really am happy with the way we ran the campaign. I think we ran an honest campaign. I think we talked about issues and got to talk about things that a lot of people in the same position in a different race might not have been able to, so I’m happy with the level of success in that area that we had.”
“The Runner-Up” starts on Esquire Network in April.