In Harry Shearer’s Web Series, Richard Nixon Is Stranger Than Fiction

40 years after Richard Nixon‘s resignation, Harry Shearer is playing the 37th President’s shady White House dealings for laughs. Shearer is the star of Nixon’s The One, a six-episode series that is now available via My Damn Channel.

In Nixon’s The One, Shearer steers the former President through a series of conversations with his aides and confidants. The series’ main gimmick is that the script is entirely true to life; Shearer and co-creator Stanley Kutler combed through hundreds of hours of White House tapes in search of “bizarre, funny, spooky, crazy, weird conversations.”

The result is a profile of a man who Shearer calls “the great American comic character of the 20^th century. The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live cast member has been fascinated with Nixon from a young age; he grew up in California in the 50s, when Nixon served as one of the state’s US Senators. “He was so thoroughly determined to keep from public view his authentic reactions to things,” Shearer said in an interview with The Daily Beast, “and then he was totally incapable of [not] blurting them out in odd moments.”

The result is a peculiar comedy that will appeal to political junkies. The first episode features Nixon and Henry Kissinger (played by Henry Goodman) as they discuss the White House’s taping system.

Nixon’s The One first arrived in 2012, when it aired on the UK’s Sky Arts channel. Two years later, American viewers can experience now experience it for themselves. Check it out over at My Damn Channel.