Alt-X

Genre: 1 hour Drama Synopsis: SUTTON GAINES wakes up in a panic. He's not in his own bed from the night before but in a Denver hotel. The date is correct – May 19, 2020 – but everything about his world has changed. He had gone to bed the night before as a Riverdale, GA high school English teacher, only to awaken the next morning with the news on TV talking about him as the presidential candidate for the Freedom Party (whatever the hell that is)?? Aides burst into his room to prep him for his jam-packed campaign schedule today, as his chief rival for the Oval Office, as per the TV, is incumbent PRESIDENT MALAAK SHABAZZ, who's taking a brief stop off the campaign trail to celebrate her father's 95th birthday, a man we all knew as MALCOLM X?!? Wait – Malcolm X is alive (but Martin Luther King is still dead)? And this President is a Republican? Aboard Air Force One, Malaak and her twin sister/Chief of Staff MALIKAH SHABAZZ-DUCEY are at it again. As leader of a conservative, yet “not nearly as racist as our reality's" Republican Party, Malaak frequently battles on policy issues with Malikah, an accomplished, liberal political operative who mostly agreed to serve in her administration as an effort to repair their fractured family. She tries to calm the President down about the prospect of seeing their father. Malcolm X is in good health for his age but clearly in DGAF Mode, frequently criticizing his daughter through the press. Malikah gives a brief update on a small, off-the-books working group set out to expose social media and electronic manipulation of the election by a cabal of closeted racist politicians. In this reality, one where there's Medicaid for all, universal basic income, and a balanced budget nearly free of debt thanks to 25 years of relative peace and prosperity, Americans are less liable to indulge tribalism and racist views so openly. But the institutional rot remains – and Malikah’s determined to root it out. As Sutton is shuttled from one speech to the next, he slowly pieces together this alternate reality he's in. After Clinton, all the presidents were different. 9/11 never happened. Barack Obama's just a three-term senator from Illinois. The Freedom Party is a legitimate third party created by disgruntled Independents who felt the two-party system was too corporate and broken. Sutton's wife and kids are totally new to him. Despite having a marriage on the brink of divorce, he misses the wife and daughter he had the night before. Slipping his Secret Service detail, he finds her as a single, never married woman, managing a Pappadeaux's north of Atlanta. Why has she never married? Is she a totally different person, one with whom he could get along? They meet. He's a stranger to her but, yet, there's an odd kind of chemistry that instantly makes him feel at home… When found, whisked away, and admonished by his frantic body man, CLAY MARSHALL, Sutton decides to confide in him that he has somehow jumped into an alternate reality. Clay thinks he's nuts. Right then, Sutton gets a crippling migraine, blacks out. He awakens in a hospital, being visited by a stranger, who introduces herself as PAULA BRIGHT. She tells him that more migraines are coming, but he'll get used to them with some medicine. Whispering in his ear, Paula says, "I know what happened to you, Sutton – because it happened to me. You're not the only one."