BrainDead (Season 1)

Watch BrainDead (2016) online on iFILM — a CBS political comedy series where Washington gridlock has a shockingly literal explanation: alien bugs are eating the brains of senators. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Laurel Healy, a wide-eyed Capitol Hill staffer who starts connecting the dots.

She takes a job working for her senator brother, expecting partisan bickering — and gets something far weirder. Staffers forget their own positions overnight. Politicians swing from one extreme to the other between press conferences. Turns out space insects have been crawling into people's ears and rewiring their politics from the inside. Tony Shalhoub plays a scheming Republican senator, Aaron Tveit the Democrat across the aisle. Both are in the bugs' crosshairs.

Robert and Michelle King — the duo behind The Good Wife — built this as satire with a horror chassis: a procedural about alien infestation that doubles as a takedown of 2016 Washington. It's sharper when it plays the absurdity dead straight. Thirteen episodes, one tight season. Stream BrainDead online on iFILM.