The Kennedys: After Camelot is a new minseries debuting this Sunday on the Reelz Channel. It’s a sequel to the cable channel’s 2011 miniseries The Kennedys that depicted the exploits of the famed liberal political dynasty during the 1960s.
After Camelot chronicles various episodes the lives of the Kennedy’s including the 1969 Chappaquidick incident in which Ted Kennedy (played by Matthew Perry) drove a car off a bridge and plunged into the water which resulted in the death of his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne, as well dramatizing the ill-fated marriage of Jackie Kennedy (Katie Holmes) to shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.
It’s a good deal less controversial than the first series which was pulled by the History Channel, and picked up by Reelz, after Kennedy allies publicly criticized the project. The hostility wasn’t helped by the fact that the show’s producer Joel Surnow is a prominent Hollywood conservative.
Surnow hasn’t returned for the second series and the new production team has found a way to stick it to Donald Trump. Even though the first Kennedys miniseries ended with the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy, on more than one occasion the new miniseries features RFK’s celebrated speech announcing the death of Martin Luther King in which he hailed the civil rights icon ‘s “effort to understand with compassion and love.”
“There’s no chronological, or indeed dramatic, reason for that particular speech to be included in the miniseries,” a source tells Heat Street, “as it had been made months before the events depicted in The Kennedys: After Camelot.
“But it has been included to encourage viewer comparisons between RFK and Trump and his perceived tactics of division. The speech is repeated in the show to reinforce the modern-day parallel they’re trying to make.”
That’s not to say the Kennedy clan will be completely satisfied with the new production. The show depicts Kopechne, who was killed when Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge in Martha’s Vineyard, dying due to suffocation hours after the accident and not instantly—strongly suggesting that she could have been saved had the authorities been alerted sooner.