Due to production schedules, US political dramas aiming for realism had to take a gamble and predict the outcome of last year's elections before they happened. Only a few minutes into the new series of Homeland, we know that the makers of the show made the wrong call.
"She's huddled with her transition team, poring over briefing books, taking meetings," a journalist tells a TV camera.
If only it were so. In reality, "she" lost, which means that the sixth season of Homeland will now be a counterfactual thought-experiment on the effects of a female president on geopolitics.
"Maybe it's time to realise that not every problem in the Middle East deserves a military solution," she suggests in the first episode. Woah there, you basket-weaving hippie!
But the new Madame President quickly shows her true colours by displaying relish towards lethal drone programmes. She needs to have a word with Homeland heroine Carrie Mathison, who has learned a thing or two over the past fifth season.
A short summary of her lessons: drones are bad. Don't get attached to men who have been brainwashed by the CIA or terrorists, because it will only end badly. Don't work for creepy polo-necked German billionaires.
Oh, wait - she hasn't actually learnt that latter lesson yet. She still works for a creepy polo-necked German billionaire, though this time in New York rather than Europe. Carrie still wears scarves, though thus far round her neck rather than over her head.
Her former co-worker and would-be lover Quinn, the Jon Snow of Homeland, is not dead, but neither is he OK. Carrie remains an idealist, but increasingly for the other side: we see her holding forth about detention rates of Muslim men.
That plotline couldn't be more relevant in the Trump era of Muslim bans and "extreme vetting". Counter-terrorism operatives arresting a young immigrant man even accuse him of being radicalised by "bad people", a line straight out of the Trump playbook.
Carrie's former colleagues have their sights aimed at "homegrown, do-it-yourself jihadists", which makes it sound like people brewing organic craft beer.
WATCH the trailer for Homeland S6
Homeland continues to deal with global politics in sweeping brushstrokes - Nigeria is reduced to "the playground of Boko Haram" - but the evolution of the main character over the past seasons has done a decent job of capturing some of the complexities of the "war on terror".
There's still a part of me that wishes Carrie would give it all up for a quieter life. Stay on her meds, listen to some soft jazz, have less occasion to bring out her patented Carrie Mathison Cry Face. In a world where the bad hombres are found in unexpected quarters, though, Carrie ain't done yet.
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