Embarrassed Prime Video Uses Friday News Dump to Share Melania: The Series Trailer

With all the ceremony of a parent transferring a goldfish to the toilet bowl, Prime Video used a Friday-after-the-election news dump to announce the release date of Melania: The Series. It’s out November 20th, and the new trailer is so bad that TV critics are jealous of the goldfish. The first preview is a mishmash of tones that advertises surface-level propaganda for the one-third of Americans who still approve of the Trumps. It opens with tense blues guitars and Melania Trump saying, “Everyone wants to be close to power, and sometimes [it] can be very dangerous.” Cue the flashing police lights, but the tension in the music immediately resolves, and “danger” is never mentioned again. Next, she’s a “modern” First Lady whose son is her “first priority,” and who never in this trailer directly mentions her husband. We do see Donald looming at her side in news footage, but the trailer can’t decide whether he’s a part of the story or not, and instead of answering that directly, it settles on the occasional jump scare. Melania: The Series will air in two parts: Family & Trust, which should be about Stormy Daniels but seems instead to cover how handsome Barron is, and Pride & Honor, which, that section of the trailer suggests, involves her personally saving the victims of an anonymous natural disaster. Did I mention this trailer is weird? Like an alternate history of America where the last 12 years have been as boring as Melania herself? You can watch it below, but you’d probably have more fun reading my colleague Liz Shannon Miller’s very funny review of the Melania movie.