Mr. Clooney, Make Television Great Again

After George Clooney commandeered the op-ed section of the New York Times to counsel President Joe Biden to depart the presidential race, it was only a matter of hours before the former President Donald Trump emerged with a Truth Social post on the topic.

Trump took Clooney to task on a variety of fronts. 

A man for whom loyalty is a cardinal virtue, Trump was seemingly offended by Clooney’s back-stabbing of a man for whom he just hosted a ginormous fundraiser. 

“He’s turned on Crooked Joe like the rats they both are,” Trump wrote, almost seeming to come to the defense of poor old Joe. “What does Clooney know about anything?”

Trump also saw through Clooney’s lame attempt to frame his cry for Biden to depart the race as an expression of gratitude for this very greatest of all presidents—but one whose time has now, alas, passed. “Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020,” Clooney wrote, presumably weeping. “We need him to do it again in 2024.”

Balderdash, says the former president.

“He uses the Democrat ‘talking point’ that Biden, the WORST President in the history of the United States, has ‘saved our Democracy,’” Trump wrote, proceeding to produce a quick litany of the Biden administration’s failings.

Yet Trump’s most stinging attack of Clooney came when he turned to the state of the actor’s own screen career.

Perhaps the most entertainment industry-attuned figure to ever hold elected office, Trump called Clooney a “fake movie actor” who “never came close to making a great movie.” And, in a slashing if oblique reference to Clooney’s famously labored attempt to expand his horizons beyond the hit NBC medical drama ER, Trump wrote: “Clooney should get out of politics and go back to television. Movies never really worked for him!!!”

As with so much of his commentary on Truth Social, Trump’s analysis of Clooney’s career was simultaneously not entirely accurate and deeply, profoundly true.

Clooney, who turned 63 this year, did indeed take a long and winding road to reach a theater near you. Having kicked around the business since the early 1980s, his earliest screen work included two movies with the unpromising verb “Return” in their titles: Return to Horror High (1987) and Return of the Killer Tomatoes! (1988). 

Television wasn’t much kinder at first—he was on a few seasons each of The Facts of Life and Roseanne—but Clooney finally found himself, in his early thirties, as Dr. Doug Ross on ER. He became an integral part of Americans’ sleep patterns on Thursday nights from 1994 to 1999, and he found himself nominated for Emmys and Golden Globes. No one can take this from him.

Like David Caruso of NYPD Blue, though, Clooney was a TV star who saw TV as a mere stepping stone to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. While still saving lives on ER, Clooney seized the movie offers that started coming his way: From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), One Fine Day (1996), The Peacemaker (1997). Well, on the basis of this run, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, and, heck, even George’s dear aunt Rosemary Clooney could rest easy: George was no movie star. 

And in the headache-inducing comic-book nightmare Batman & Robin (1997), Clooney proved to be the Roger Moore of the Caped Crusader franchise: a goofy, grinning nonentity. Among prior Batmans, even Adam West was more believably brooding.

Then Clooney realized that he might do well to lean into his image as a likable bonehead. He was never better than as a shambling, easily foiled bank robber in Steven Soderbergh’s 1998 crime comedy Out of Sight—the first time he delivered a good performance in a quality picture. So Trump is wrong on this one: Clooney did once come close to making a great movie.

In the revived Ocean’s Eleven franchise in the early 2000s, Clooney was again agreeably silly. This was also his disposition in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and Burn After Reading (2008), in which it was never clear whether the Coen Brothers were laughing with or at him.

Somewhere along the way, though, Clooney got a serious case of seriousness. He started directing movies notable for their sanctimony, including a panegyric to Edward R. Murrow, Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), and The Ides of March (2011). And somewhere along the way, audiences kind of stopped caring. Sure, his films can still produce a nice box-office return, but when was the last time a new Clooney movie was a genuine event? Up in the Air in 2009? The Descendants in 2011? Does 2013’s Gravity count, or did that movie really rest on the shoulders of Sandra Bullock? 

Raise your hand if you have seen his last few films as star or director, including Suburbicon (2017), The Midnight Sky (2020), Ticket to Paradise (2022), and The Boys in the Boat (2023). Undoubtedly, Clooney has received more attention from his anti-Biden op-ed than he has in years. 

Mr. President, pay no attention to the man from Hollywood trying to deflate your campaign. George Clooney does not have the secret to winning the hearts and minds of the American public. If he did, he would have made more hits, more regularly. 

And as for you, Mr. Clooney: You saved television once in 1994. We need you to do it again in 2024. I see your future: an ER reboot on the Peacock streaming service!

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