Categories: OLD Media Moves

Showtime teams with Bloomberg for political show

Co-authors John Heilemann, left, and Mark Halperin attend the premiere of HBO Films' "Game Change" at the Ziegfeld Theatre on Wednesday, March 7, 2012 in New York. (AP Photo/Evan Agostini)

Co-authors John Heilemann, left, and Mark Halperin attend the premiere of HBO Films’ “Game Change” at the Ziegfeld Theatre on Wednesday, March 7, 2012 in New York. (AP Photo/Evan Agostini)

Showtime announced Tuesday it’s teaming up with Bloomberg Politics for “The Circus: Inside The Greatest Political Show On Earth,” a half-hour, Sunday night program that will feature Bloomberg Politics managing editors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, reports Michael Calderone of The Huffington Post.

Calderone writes, “The weekly series will be a product of an increasingly compressed political news cycle, in which books and documentaries, which once came out long after the final votes were tallied, are dropping in the heat of campaign season. While Halperin and Heilemann’s best-selling books on the 2008 and 2012 elections didn’t hit shelves until at least a year after those races ended, the first book offering fly-on-the-wall details of several 2016 Republican campaigns was published last month. Similarly, the documentary Caucus, which took viewers inside the 2012 nominating contest in Iowa, wasn’t released until late 2013, but some news organizations, including The Huffington Post, are experimenting with documentary-style coverage this cycle as the campaigns unfold.

“‘Americans are captivated by the 2016 presidential election and a real-time political series of this nature has never been done before,’ said Showtime president David Nevins said in a statement. ‘People don’t want to wait a year to see how and why things played out and the impact they had. Everything today is immediate, so there’s no better time to change the way American politics are covered.'”