Thomas Callaway as Bob Forehead in WASHINGTOON

Washington is currently the setting for a number of popular TV shows … you know the ones. But what your streaming services aren’t showing are many of the D.C.-centric TV shows that didn’t quite make it. And one of them may have featured a prescient look at today’s campaign cycle.

Adapted from the cartoon by Mark Alan Stamaty, the political satire Washingtoon lasted for just one short season in 1985. Although Showtime is one of today’s biggest cable networks, it didn’t have that kind of media saturation 30 years ago. In fact, when the show originally aired, Stamaty was unable to watch the channel in the under-served market where he lived: Manhattan.

The comic strip “Washingtoon” debuted in The Washington Post and the Village Voice in 1981, and at its peak was carried in over 40 newspapers; Stamaty published two collections of the comic strip. The sitcom Washingtoon also followed the adventures of Rep. Bob Forehead, played by Tom Callaway. As the series opens, Callaway is a naive newcomer to Washington. In his first session in the House, the freshman Representative proposes the Beer and Television Act, which would allow Americans to make tax deductions for their annual expenses in those categories. The proposal marks him as “Yuck of the Week” on a local TV program, but it makes him a hit with constituents.

The program featured a few familiar faces. Barry Corbin, who was later a regular on Northern Exposure, plays the Minority Whip, Senator Bunky Muntner. A young Christina Applegate, two years before Married with Children, plays one of Forehead’s bratty, precocious children, who scoffs at her dad’s proposal for a rotating space city.

In his review of the series premiere, Tom Shales called Washingtoon “a promising beginning,” but although Stamaty has gone on to a long career as a cartoonist, the TV show is seldom remembered. We recently asked Stamaty about the show, the toon, and their legacy.

DCist: Washingtoon the show seemed to make no attempt to capture your idiosyncratic visual style. What did you think of it?

Stamaty: I made the choice to not be involved in the making of the show. If it happened today, I probably would get involved. At the time, I had a few reasons. Essentially, I just wanted to focus on doing the comic strip and not get involved with a team of writers, etc. in this whole other thing. If this were to happen today, I’d probably want to be an executive producer and be in the writers’ room, etc.

(Courtesy of Mark Stamaty)

At the time, also, Showtime was not available in Manhattan where I lived then and where I still live. So even though I eventually did get a VHS tape of all the shows, I’ve never actually seen all the shows. And the videotape I have is now fairly badly impaired. So I may never see all the shows. At the time, I didn’t want the show to influence my comic strip. I was not comfortable with collaboration in those years. I think I might find it quite intriguing now. People grow and change.

I will say this: the man who played Bob Forehead, Tom Callaway, is a very nice guy. And his wife was a very nice person also. I met them when I appeared with Tom on the Maury Povich show “Panorama” that ran locally in Washington back then. I contacted him a few years ago. He’d left acting and has a successful business on the west coast and he’s still a very nice guy.

DCist: Paul Krugman once compared Steve Forbes to Bob Forehead. Are there any candidates in this campaign cycle that remind you of Bob Forehead?

Stamaty: I actually did a couple of cartoons about Steve Forbes when I was doing Washingtoon in Time Magazine for two years (1994 to 1996). And Steve Forbes’ museum bought one of the originals.

Paul Krugman is absolutely correct that Steve Forbes had similarly idiotic economic policies to those of Bob Forehead. Forbes was always pushing the “Flat Tax”, which was a blatant giveaway to rich people like himself. Bob, of course, was a big-time Supply-Sider, as, I believe, Forbes was. Essentially: more for the rich.

In today’s bunch, Ted Cruz is pushing a flat tax. I just can’t believe the gall of these people or the gullibility of voters who fall for that nonsense.

But, of course, there is policy and there is style. Bob Forehead was always about style over substance. And, by that standard, one could consider Donald Trump to be very much in the Bob Forehead tradition. Trump is pretty much all style and outrageous untruths and bad behavior and yet his style and personality overpower his terrifying drive to become the American Mussolini. In the minds of his supporters, they seem to just want a big, strong daddy. Politics has always had a very major part of it that addresses the reptile brain in people. In Trump’s case, it has gone to previously unimaginable lengths. Bob Forehead was foolish, cynical, and an empty suit, but he was never as dangerous as Donald Trump.

The origins of Bob Forehead were all about the lingering deep nostalgia for President Kennedy. When I first started researching for Washingtoon and spending a lot of time in Washington, in congressional hearings and all over, I noticed a lot of politicians who looked like JFK and seemed to be imitating him in superficial ways, regardless of party affiliation, etc. They had these “Kennedys of the Right.” Conservative Republicans who seemed to mimic him and also make a big deal of JFK’s tax cut to promote their Supply Side agenda. So my Washingtoon featured the JFK Look-Alike Caucus.

In some sense, I think today’s Republican Party is replete with Bob Foreheads. A lot of barely thinking automatons that keep pushing the same Ronald-Reagan-Was-God agenda in a mindless, irresponsible way that I think even Reagan would be troubled by.

Stamaty (left) performs in the Oval Office. Courtesy Mark Stamaty.

DCist: Your 2010 book Shake, Rattle and Turn that Noise Down addresses your longtime admiration for Elvis Presley, which you took to unusual heights. How did you happen to perform an Elvis impersonation for the Clintons in the Oval Office?

Stamaty: There used to be a wonderful guy at the Washington Post who was managing editor and who loved cartoons and cartoonists, Howard Simons.

So Howard began a tradition in the 1970s of hosting an annual private dinner party once a year for a small group of editorial cartoonists and their wives or dates and a handful of people from the Post, like Mrs. Graham, Donald Graham, Meg Greenfield, David Broder, Haynes Johnson, etc. And for some one-time guests who were, generally, prominent politicians. Over the years the group grew with some added permanent members, such as Senator Moynihan, Ted Koppel, etc. After Howard left the Post, Meg Greenfield took over as hostess of the dinner. In 1981, I was invited in as a permanent member.

After the meal was done, there was a tradition of storytelling. Cartoonists like Mike Peters and Jeff MacNelly were especially hilarious. The first time I was invited, I didn’t have any stories I felt like telling, so I did my Elvis impersonation instead. It went over well and it became a tradition. Meg started calling it the “benediction.” Every year the cartoonists’ dinner ended with me doing my Elvis.

In 1991, Al Gore and Tipper were among the one-time guests. As it happened, I had known Al Gore since 1982. He’d always said he was a big fan of Washingtoon. He hadn’t known that I did an Elvis impersonation, but he found out that night.

So, jump ahead two years, it is March, 1993. Haynes Johnson’s date that he brought to the dinner every year was working in the Clinton White House. So she arranged for all of us cartoonists and our dates to visit President Clinton in the Oval Office around noon on the Saturday of the dinner. When Saturday arrived, along with it came a huge blizzard. So Washington was buried in snow. But we got our visit. We were in there with the president for about an hour. At some point, Vice President Gore joined us.

After a while, the vice president said: “In his lifetime, Elvis only visited the White House once, but he’s here among us today.”

So the request was in. So I stood up, took off my tie and jacket, unbuttoned a couple of shirt buttons, rolled up my collar and did a verse of “All Shook Up.” The president liked it so much that he sent an aide up to his private bedroom to fetch an Elvis tie from his closet, which he gave to me. I got him to sign it and thus was my fleeting brush with history.

Watch the opening credits of Washingtoon: