The making of a president, circa 2040

Running for president of the United States and launching a network television show have more in common than you might imagine.

Both start with a core group of believers, but the efforts end up demanding an army of workers. Both rely on advertising, but ultimate success depends on the appeal of the message. Both have do-or-die moments this fall.

And in both arenas, conventional wisdom is that it’s dangerous to mess with conventional wisdom. (Just ask Howard Dean.) But the people behind the WB’s “Jack & Bobby” are pushing the family drama in decidedly untraditional directions.

Premiering next Sunday, the series focuses on Jack McCallister, a natural leader and high school sports star, his less-assured younger brother, Bobby, and their brilliant but flawed mother, Grace. To that point, it resembles many family dramas, not the least being the WB’s own “Everwood.”

But one of these boys is going to be elected president in 2040 -- and not just any commander in chief, but a heroic leader with touches of John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. The other will die young (which is revealed at the end of the first episode). Themes explored around the McCallister dinner table read like a course outline for a current events class: racism, sexuality, religious intolerance, the Patriot Act. It’s not a simple sell as prime-time TV entertainment.

“Jack & Bobby” has big stylistic ambitions as well. Intercut throughout each episode are documentary-like interviews with President McCallister’s friends, advisors, adversaries and wife. These comments from the year 2049 illuminate how seemingly innocuous moments in the brothers’ lives add up to what drives the future president.

That touch of otherworldliness fused with real-world politics sets “Jack & Bobby” apart from the simpler teen-soap antics of “The O.C.” or “One Tree Hill” -- or most of what’s on network TV.

“The question now is: How do you create scripted shows that are more provocative, more honest, more in-your-face? I don’t think too many people get thrown off television for being too provocative,” says executive producer Thomas Schlamme, whose work on “The West Wing” and “Sports Night” won him an armful of Emmys. “You get thrown off of television for not being provocative enough.”

Co-creator and lead writer-producer Greg Berlanti has a term for the show’s genre, suggested by a dean from his alma mater, Northwestern University, after a recent visit to the set. “It’s like political science fiction.”

Sci-fi has always been a tricky proposition on TV -- shows with Klingons or Agent Mulder aside -- and politics as a core theme has really only worked with “The West Wing.” Issues-oriented shows? Young viewers seem to endorse the oldest saying in Hollywood: If you want to send a message, call Western Union.

A VEHICLE FOR CHANGE?

“Jack & Bobby” may be a risky prospect, but the mood is light as the show’s producers, writers and cast gather around a large conference table in mid-August for the first read-through of the fourth episode.

The feeling in this featureless room attached to a soundstage in Hollywood is that they’re working on the kind of show that can turn around the WB’s lagging fortunes, and that can breathe new life into the beleaguered scripted-drama genre.

It’s still early, of course, too soon for harsh reviews or discouraging ratings to have dampened spirits. The network is clearly behind the show too. DVDs of the first episode were inserted into last week’s Entertainment Weekly. The network did some guerrilla marketing at the Republican convention, distributing buttons that read “Bush in 2004, McCallister in 2040.”

Berlanti, boyish, energetic and possessing a boisterous laugh, sits halfway down the long table. He got his start on “Dawson’s Creek,” then created and executive produces “Everwood,” and now oversees this show as well. Only midway through shooting the third episode of “Jack & Bobby,” the cast and crew are somewhat unfamiliar with one another, so Berlanti plays host, introducing everyone -- particularly to some of the writers who typically don’t turn up on the set, choosing to work instead at the show’s main offices in Burbank.

At one end of the table sits Schlamme, who’s still getting used to being on the sideline, unlike at “The West Wing,” where he oversaw every detail the first four seasons. Because not all of the guest actors are in on this reading, and because he looks the part, Schlamme reads the role of a rabbi who briefly mentors one of the McCallister boys. Schlamme plays the rabbinic sage for the producers, writers and cast as well, who hope they’ll have the kind of heat for this show that he had with “The West Wing” and even “Sports Night.”

Christine Lahti, an Emmy and Golden Globe-winning actress who’s also Schlamme’s wife, plays Grace McCallister. She sits across from Berlanti, and it’s clear the “Chicago Hope” veteran’s enthusiasm for the words she’s reading is passed along to the mostly much younger actors around the table. This includes newcomer Matt Long and young Logan Lerman, who play Jack and Bobby McCallister, respectively, who sit to Lahti’s right. Both read their lines with a confidence that suggests this ensemble has been working together more than just a few weeks.

The topic of the episode -- written by Maggie Friedman, who listens keenly to how her dialogue is sounding -- is faith and religious intolerance. Grace, a professor at a fictional Missouri college, becomes the subject of a campus protest for denouncing organized religion in her class. Bobby, meanwhile, helps a friend prepare for his bar mitzvah and proves to be the better Torah student. From the future, we learn that the Catholic Church has admitted women to the priesthood. It’s not exactly lightweight teen-drama fluff. But by the end of the reading, there are smiles all around.

“I think we find ourselves not only inspired by the happenings of the current political season but also by the opportunities to talk to people in an election year,” says Vanessa Taylor, a co-executive producer and co-creator whom Berlanti brought over from “Everwood,” after the reading’s done. Taylor’s been shaping the character of Grace in particular. “We try to inspire people to get engaged, be involved, to care, to find ways to make politics personal.”

That “Jack & Bobby” will debut amid a fiercely contested and polarizing presidential campaign could be a boon, or a disaster. The young audience that typically watches the WB is notoriously uninterested in national politics. So for all their social ambitions, the people who work on the show take pains to emphasize this isn’t just a dramatized episode of C-SPAN.

“ ‘Jack & Bobby’ is a family show,” says Schlamme, his long, curly hair peeking out of his white baseball cap (Berlanti too sports the de rigueur headwear of Hollywood’s creative elite). Though he does most of his work out of offices on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, not far from where “The West Wing” is shot, he’s relaxing on a couch in his spare “Jack & Bobby” digs. “What this show does is provide little snapshots of this kid’s life that add up to the jigsaw puzzle of what made him great.”

AMALGAM OF ART AND REALITY

That is, of course, exactly what Democrats and Republicans just did at their televised national conventions, where short films crafted a narrative out of the candidates’ personal and political histories. The similarity to “Jack & Bobby” didn’t escape the notice of a political operative like Steve “Scoop” Cohen, another of the show’s creators.

“In some ways, they’re our show,” says Cohen, who got his nickname from George Stephanopoulos while working on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. “They have to take the candidate’s whole life and tell it in 10 minutes, and really the bulk of those videos are from their childhood, their formative years. They humanize them. They’re supposed to make you think, ‘If they were little boys then they must’ve gone through what I went through.’ ”

Like Lawrence O’Donnell and Dee Dee Myers before him, Cohen’s a Democratic politico who traded Washington for Hollywood. He worked for Bill and Hillary Clinton until 1998, after which he and partner Brad Meltzer hatched the initial idea for a series about a future president. Cohen still can’t believe his double good fortune: He went to the White House on his first campaign and sold his first script idea.

The names “Jack & Bobby” may evoke the Kennedy clan, but given Cohen’s background and the politician-from-a-broken-home motif, it’s impossible not to see something of Clinton in the characters.

Cohen acknowledges that the germ of the idea sprouted after he spent time with Clinton in the former president’s hometown of Hope, Ark., hearing him talk about his childhood.

“President Clinton used to talk all the time about Uncle Buddy, his uncle in Hope, who he ended up naming his dog after,” Cohen says. “He used to talk about sitting on his porch in his rocking chair, a very Rockwell-esque moment, and how the lessons imparted to him stayed with him a lifetime. We get to do that, we get to introduce ‘Uncle Buddy,’ whoever he is.... The show is a mosaic of President McCallister’s life and pieces we pick up along the way.”

As the project developed, particularly after Schlamme teamed with Berlanti, the show began to focus on Grace McCallister as well. “What you saw in so many of these great men was their relationship with their mother,” Schlamme says.

Grace, a loving but demanding mother, alternately challenges and tortures her sons. As Berlanti says, “This woman speaks in paragraphs.” She’s sometimes likable, sometimes infuriating -- not unlike Clinton in some respects, especially as Lahti describes him.

“What was always so intriguing to me about Bill Clinton was how he came from that dysfunctional background and became that person that’s so amazing and brilliant and flawed and visionary,” says Lahti, who read up on Clinton’s mother, Virginia, as she prepared for the role.

FUTURE ROOTED IN THE PAST

TALL and gently powerful, her hair in tight curls, Lahti is relaxing in her trailer, just outside the soundstage on the Warner Hollywood studios lot where the cramped McCallister house set sits. “Virginia was very different from Grace,” she says, “but one thing they shared was this lust for life, this thirst for adventure and compassion for others, sort of a humanity.... She also had an incredibly passionate belief in her boys.”

Never far from the writers’ minds is the idea that all of the stories -- involving mother and sons, professor and students, brother and brother and teen boys and girls (newcomer Jessica Pare plays a new girl in town with a central role in both brothers’ lives) -- have to fit into the larger arc of transforming a boy into a world leader. In showing what President McCallister goes through as a young man, the writers have to be thinking about how events will resonate later in his political career. For instance, after growing up in a liberal household, he’ll become a Republican but be elected as an independent.

But if the writers must take the long view, the actors are working hard to do just the opposite.

“I’m not thinking that my son will die ... before my other son becomes president,” Lahti says. “I can’t think about that.”

Long, who plays the charismatic but tormented Jack, says he too hasn’t given much thought to his character’s future. He’s just trying to keep focused on Jack’s present while adjusting to the trappings of TV stardom.

The 24-year-old from Kentucky was still marveling one day recently at the experience of seeing billboards with his picture on them at the Grove shopping center.

“It looks like me,” Long says, “but it’s hard to get around seeing your head 15 feet high on a billboard.”

But then something happened that helped him keep his soon-to-be celebrity in perspective.

“We were sitting at an Italian restaurant at the Grove,” Long remembers. “Simon Cowell is two tables away and let me tell you, man, no one was looking at me. Not yet.”

Although he plays the less-experienced younger brother, Lerman is the more experienced actor -- most notably as Mel Gibson’s young son in “The Patriot.” He says his acting can’t project too much of his character’s destiny. “I’m just playing him the way I think I should be playing him, just a naive boy, pretty much,” Lerman says. “He’s just a normal kid.”

So is Lerman -- though that could change quickly if “Jack & Bobby” becomes a success. Before production began, the 12-year-old spent what could be his last season as an anonymous summer camper.

His mother, who’s sitting nearby, points out the kind of foreshadowing that might just end up in a “Jack & Bobby” script: The other campers voted Logan “most likely to rule the world.”

“Jack & Bobby” will air Sundays at 9 p.m. on the WB, premiering next Sunday.