Oddly enough, Strong began his entertainment career playing key roles in cult series – Jonathan Levinson on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”; Paris’ boyfriend on “Gilmore Girls”; the hopeful copywriter hired after Don Draper stole his idea on “Mad Men.” We caught up with him in Atlanta last week.

Sarah Palin is introduced on about page 350 of John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s “Game Change,” a book that covered the 2008 Obama, Clinton, McCain and Edwards races as well. Was it always going to be just about her?

It was the director Jay Roach’s concept to just do the Palin story, and I agreed that I thought that was the best approach, for various reasons. One, I thought it was the most exciting story in the book, but not only that, I thought it was one of the most exciting stories in recent American politics. I just thought it would make an amazing movie. I also thought that doing a story about Barack Obama at this time, it would be impossible for the film not to come across as an informercial for his reelection and it would be difficult for an audience to get lost in a movie about him while he was still president. I think there’s a great movie there, too. But I think that movie needs to be made after he’s out of office.

When did you start to work on this? And, as in “Recount,” I understand it began with a lot of your own reporting.

I think we started in late summer, 2010. I did 25 interviews with people in the campaign and then read a ton of other books, too, on the subject, particularly Sarah Palin’s book “Going Rogue,” which was a beat-by-beat account of what happened in the campaign from her point of view.

What percentage of the movie was based on the book and what was your own reporting?

I would say 90 percent of the movie is the book, 5 percent is my original reporting, 5 percent is other sources.  But so much of my own reporting was just trying to confirm the veracity of the book, which I found to be extremely accurate, based on the interviews.

I don’t want to misrepresent I was some big scoop-getter in this process. The movie really is built on the back of reporting of the book. There’s nothing I found out that I wouldn’t have been able to find out if it hadn’t been the work John and Mark had done. But there’s one thing [I found out] that’s already been put on record that I’ll just mention – that Palin thought that the queen of England was the ruler of England. That’s something I got from my own reporting.

There were also some surprising quotes in the book that I don’t remember seeing in the movie, such as when she said during a low point of preparing for her single debate “If I’d known everything I know now, I wouldn’t have done this.”

Yeah, you know that was in the movie. It was in the script and was shot. It just ended up on the cutting room floor. But you’re absolutely right. It’s an amazing line, isn’t it? When you’re editing a film, you’re just trying to get it to breathe; you’re trying to make it work. Things kind of just get cut here and there. And that was just one of those moments. I believe that line was the casualty of a scene that was made significantly shorter.

How was this process different from your last film, which was also a political potboiler based on recent events?

In the case of “Recount,” I had never done anything like that before. I had no background in journalism. I always tell people the biggest advantage is that I had no idea what I was doing. It was really exhilarating and kind of scary. By the time I did this, I’d done several projects now where I’ve interviewed people. I’ve just done it a lot more. I’m used to it; I’m used to dealing with sources.

Also, one of the big differences between the two films is that “Recount” has Democrats and Republicans, but this one is just Republicans. By the way, I prefer dealing with just one party in a movie rather than dealing with two, because you have all these balance issues that have nothing to do with story. You know, for every scene of one party, you have to have a scene of the other, kind of thing. In this we just get to tell our story.

Did you see any similarities in Katherine Harris, who is one of the central characters in “Recount”?

I don’t really see many  similarities between Katherine Harris and Sarah Palin as far as their portrayal in film. In “Recount,” Katherine Harris is secretary of state of Florida overseeing the recount process. The film shows how she, beat by beat, does everything she can to help one candidate. That’s violating her oath of office, and I think the film is very critical of that.

In “Game Change,” the film doesn’t show Sarah Palin doing anything unethically. It shows how Palin goes on to become this beloved, charismatic figure within the party, whereas Katherine Harris is not. This is just the story of someone who has been thrust on the national spotlight literally overnight, as Katherine Harris was, and is doing her best to try and make things work. I think Katherine Harris was doing her best to try to help one candidate get elected, when she should have been overseeing a fair and impartial process.

You do get to show the charismatic side of Palin, particularly on the rope lines or when she’s meeting other parents of Down syndrome children.

Yeah, the scenes were really moving. When campaign staffers would tell me those moments on the rope line, whether they loved Sarah Palin or didn’t love Sarah Palin, they all told me it would make them cry. You need to show what made her so beloved and dynamic. That’s an amazing part of the story.

Political dramas in general seem rife for criticism even before the film is released.

Absolutely. And that happened on “Recount” too. It happened on the Democrats’ side. Warren Christopher came out and attacked the film before he had seen it. In this case, we have Sarah Palin staffers basically attacking the film before they’ve seen it. To be honest with you, I don’t think it serves either one of them. I think both portrayals are much more complex, dynamic and layered than they realized because they hadn’t seen the film. It gives the films a lot of publicity.

We’ve had screenings across the country by now, and one of the main things that people talk to me about afterward in the Q & As is how sympathetic she comes across at times; how they never imagined they were going to see her in the light that they see her in – particularly liberal Democrats that don’t care for her are surprised about how much sympathy they have for her with the pressure she was under.

I’ve heard that one of the Palin staffers who complained had offered to be a consultant earlier.

Yeah. The offer was in an email to me, where he asked to be our confidential consultant with formal agreement. And I’m just very surprised. In the same email he basically validated the book by saying that the portrayal of Sarah Palin was complex and unique, not false and inaccurate. So I was pretty stunned that a week ago, a year after that email, he came out and attacked the film as being based on a book that’s grossly inaccurate. And if it was so grossly inaccurate, I don’t know why he would have offered to have been our confidential consultant a year ago.

We did hire a consultant. The person we hired [Chris Edwards] was someone who we thought had a very balanced, fair viewpoint of the entire campaign. He was her deputy chief of staff on the campaign, so he was there for everything.

And the reason to have a consultant is to get all the details right?

Yes. To have someone on set who sat next to Palin for those 60 days is an enormous asset. And he was primarily utilized for helping us with the technical details of what it’s really like on the campaign plane, who sits where; helping out with making the green rooms look how they actually looked. The goal was to make it look and feel as authentic as possible, and he was a great asset for that.

One of the other charges against “Game Change” is that HBO deliberately scheduled this for right after Super Tuesday to ruin any Palin election plans.

Me and Jay Roach never believed she was going to run back when we started  working on this in earnest in summer 2010. It was kind of the accepted discussion in political circles and in the press that she was not going to run, so that was really never a concern for us. And we were right; she never ran. We never thought this film was going to affect the election. I don’t think anyone who sees this movie is going to vote differently because of it. I don’t think it makes Republicans look negative. I don’t think it makes Obama look positive. I don’t think it’s going to affect the election at all.

But don’t you hope this film has an effect in the broader sense?

I hope has the effect of making people question what they want in a leader. The themes of the film aren’t partisan themes. The themes of the film are about the process, about how we elect our president and what we value in a leader, and how that value system and that process has been shifted by the internet, YouTube and the 24-hour news cycle.

I got the feeling it was a “Frankenstein” story – that these consultants had created a monster they regretted unleashing on the nation.

It was a “Pygmalion” story – I conceived it and Jay Roach completely agreed that this was a Pygmalion story of them finding an individual and then trying to turn her into something that perhaps she’s not. And there are consequences to that. And they lived the consequences.

Don’t you think it will affect any of Sarah Palin’s political plans going forward?

I don’t think anything is going to affect Sarah Palin except for Sarah Palin. No matter what she does, or what happens, she just has a base of support and they love her, and nothing’s ever going to change that. And people who are not fans of Sarah Palin — I don’t think anything’s going to change that. Because I think everyone has their opinions of her, and those opinions are essentially set in stone.

The goal of the film wasn’t to try and change anyone’s mind about anything. The goal of the film was to talk about the process of how we elect our president, and here’s a pretty crazy story in which a candidate was not vetted to be vice president of the United States. She was not properly vetted, and we came very close to having a vice president that perhaps wasn’t prepared for that job.

“Game Change” premieres Saturday at 9 p.m. on HBO.

Some of the Amish wonder if this is particularly good idea, since they have to rub shoulders so much with “the English” —  as they call the outside world — with their excess weight, leisure time and unusual questions.

Surrounded by the supercharged evils of modern America, they live in rural settings of hard work and simplicity that must not be so different from life 200 years ago. But it’s different enough to make some striking images: Bands of one-room school-bound kids in bonnets and straw hats but carrying matching new red mini-coolers lunchboxes; a scene of potato pickers at dawn that seems right out of a Corot painting; kids playing outdoors in their old-fashioned clothes but on a new-fangled trampoline.

It may be true that Puritans fled England for religious freedom, but only to a place where they could practice their beliefs and prevent others from practicing theirs. So in the early days of the Amish, according to the film by David Belton, thousands were killed for the outlawed behavior of adult baptism.

That led to these tight-knit communities in outposts that allowed such behavior, and the survival of it today depends on shunning outside temptations, especially for the young people.

Because of a belief not to be photographed, no Amish speak on camera in the documentary; they sit in shadows or more often speak off camera as remarkable, mesmerizing, slow-paced agricultural footage unspools before us. One speaks of the daily schedule as we see a group of young Amish women from afar walking up a road. It seems we see them go about a quarter mile. The voices of the elders explain their thinking, augmented by sociologists and anthropologists (whose faces we do see), speaking with some insight and little condescension.

The Amish have successfully shunned the mainstream all these years, with general success. There are compromises: They’ve had to put those orange triangles indicating a slow vehicle on their buggies (and they generally hate bright colors like pink and red).

There have been local skirmishes about obtaining building permits before a barn-raising or adhering to smoke detector requirements. But they famously won a 1971 Supreme Court case that defended their practice of educating until the eighth grade and that’s it. (Though at the time the sect was so little known that Walter Cronkite, reporting the news, called them AIM-ish).

The key to understanding the rules of the Amish is to understand that each of the communities make their own set of rules and revise them regularly. One community may ride bikes while the next one down the road bans them.

There is a brutality to the choice given to young people: Join forever or forever be shunned, and a couple of people who decided against the Amish lifestyle speak of their experiences.

The Amish have had to adjust, too, to national economic realities. It’s not practical for so much of the community to rely on agriculture as their sole income. So some have enlisted at local factories and a shot of Amish men scrambling at a factory building trailers is the most fast-paced moment in the film.

Throughout this season and last, the three “Idol” judges loved just about every audition home audiences were allowed to see. Nobody was terrible, or awful, or the worst thing anybody ever heard, to use the phrases of Simon Cowell, whose brutal honesty made the show in the first place.

That left with Cowell, leaving the teddy bear Randy Jackson as the meanest of the three, of all things. And the worst he’ll ever say is, “Dawg, singing is just not for you.” But mostly all he, Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler will ever say to the rare reject is “You’re not quite ready, sweetheart” or “Come back next year.”

Cowell was a record producer who didn’t have time for the bad, and no inclination to encourage the mediocre. More than that, he acted as if he had something on the line in considering these voices. The present judges, especially the marquee names, have no such urgency.

This far into the show, every remaining contestant seems a reminder of a past one: DeAndre Brackensick has the flowing curls of a Jason Castro (but a better voice); teary father Adam Brock the bespectacled look of Danny Gokey with blue-eyed gospel voice of Taylor Hicks. Fifteen-year-old Eben Franckewitz has the pre-puberty voice of a David Archuleta or some kid from “America’s Got Talent.”

There’s one guy with an unfortunate Vanilla Ice haircut and another who seems a little unstable until he’s allowed to play drums while singing; a third has just discovered he is the biological son of the lead singer for the truly terrible ’80s band Flotsam and Jetsam – a little flotsam off the old jetsam, if you will. It’s my favorite fun-fact about any contestant and he’s the last offspring of a famous person, since Jim Carrey’s daughter didn’t make it through Hollywood week.

Hollywood week was so hellacious this season, OSHA may want to investigate labor violations, since it pretty much forces newly formed groups to practice into the evening. So when they do perform, they’re sick or falling into the orchestra pit, or both.

If the current season has a voice of conscience it may be Heejun Han, who makes frank comments about the process and other contestants as if he’s not part of it, until it’s time for him to sing.

All of the guys are pretty good singers and already have an edge over the much more generic group of young women. Among them is David Leathers, an adorable round-faced kid with a voice like young Michael Jackson and the nickname “Mr. Steal Your Girl,” who is so obviously right for the show he plays the role Melanie Amaro played on “X Factor.” Her ouster was so glaringly mistaken, she was asked back to the show and won.

To get back on, Leathers will have to beat a giant with a soulful voice and another deep-voiced country kid with too big a cowboy hat (like the one who won Season 10 – can you remember his name now?).

The top 12 women, by contrast, seem too similar in their passable voices and smiley good looks — even their names are ridiculously similar: There’s a Hollie, a Hallie, a Haley and a Baylie. There are a few country belles in there, should audiences hanker for some more Lauren Alaina, who was runner-up last year in the all-country finals.

Among the women, there seems just a single standout: Big-voiced Jennifer Hirsh, who could be held back only because of her normal, healthy and non-traditional (that is to say: non-size zero) look. Unless voters with a long memory won’t mind harkening back to the first “American Idol” winner Kelly Clarkson, who by the way will be serving this season as a mentor … on “The Voice.”

As with so comedies built around unlikable central characters, it was tough to warm to someone so callous, dimwitted — and truly redneck. You got the feeling that some fans of the Confederate-flag waving, doobie-smoking Powers were just cheering on his antics, and longed to emulate him.

In the first season, getting hired as a gym coach at his old small-town North Carolina high school proved tough to take for a flamed-out former major leaguer. Last season, he took off for Mexico, to wallow in all manner of incorrect antics, cockfight cartels and drug mishaps. But back in the states for this third and final season, Powers has been signed by the (fake) minor-league Myrtle Beach Mermen and is living large once more.

For years, McBride and his comedy co-writer Jody Hill talked about moving the show to the so-called Redneck Riviera and now it’s happened: It’s the intersection of trashy tourist culture, chain restaurants, souped-up jet skis, tattoo shops, monster trucks, muscle T’s – in other words, a Kenny Powers paradise. He takes to it like a man with his boogie board, done up in Confederate flag and pot leaf design.

He’s even got a best friend that plays up their mutual jerkiness, Jason Sudeikis of “Saturday Night Live” fame, pitch-perfect as his catcher and pal Shane. The two cads who imagine themselves players (and wait outside the high schools for their girlfriends) egg each other on with extreme handshakes and exhortations (to the mystification of the rest of the locker room).

Powers’ one-time sweetheart April Buchanon (played by the remarkable Katy Mixon), scarcely seen in Season 2 after he ditched her at a gas station, is back in Shelby raising their now 1-year-old child. Kenny can barely bring himself to hold the baby.

Forced into fatherhood, the clueless Powers ferries the tot in a backpack that he’s cut holes in for breathing, straps him in shotgun in Shane’s big-wheel pickup (with weird DeLorean doors), uses a curtain affixed with duct tape as an all-day diaper and tries to figure out which kind of soda the kid likes best. At the beach, he digs a hole and covers him with a towel to keep him from getting sunburnt (or getting away while he body surfs).

His infant-handling skills go far beyond anything seen in “Raising Hope” or even “Raising Arizona.” There ought to be a disclaimer that no babies were hurt in the filming; after a while, you start to wonder.

And as they traverse this dangerous comedic edge every bit as skillfully as Gervais does with the little-people humor on “Life’s Too Short,” McBride celebrates the Southern-fried dirtball culture of flyover America like some “Red State Diaries”; it’s a veritable HBO “Hee-Haw.”

As he goes about his somewhat whimsical quest, some caution him that without that annual anchor, there’d be even less black history taught than before. He takes his campaign on the road; peers into the home of the month’s originator, Carter G. Woodson in Washington, D.C.; meets with the Association for the Study of African American Life and History; and goes to Virginia to see what black history means to big fans of the Confederacy.

Eventually he gets more serious about his task, realizing that while history may convey how we were, the way we tell history conveys how we are. And he’s had one direct effect: His mother, an activist, moves the date for a black history performance she had been planning out of February to help demonstrate that it is part of the fabric of U.S. history all year round.

One day, even television networks may spread their black-heritage documentaries beyond the confines of February as well. Unfortunately, two remarkable documentaries air at the same time Tuesday in many markets.

After demonstrating that he’s a sensitive observer of life in black America with “Hoop Dreams,” Steve James is back with “The Interrupters” –  a more ambitious film that follows a fearless group of activists and amateur psychologists determined to end urban violence. It makes its national TV debut this evening on Frontline (check local listings).

That James and author Alex Kotlowitz (“There Are No Children Here”) decided to focus on Chicago at the precise time its youth-killing rates and lurid viral videos made it a national news story put them in the center of the cyclone. Their alarming footage, from the center of exploding violence and retribution, put the superficial approach of the national news media and government officials — who did little more than hold press conferences — to shame.

Even more remarkable are the counselors and community-minded people, many of whom learned their lessons in the streets, who put their lives on the line to defuse the mayhem out of a regard for love and doing what’s right.

Among them, Ameena Matthews deserves to be some kind of national heroine for her street sense, humor, decency, insight and bravery, which seem to change everyone she approaches. No matter how explosive the situation, she can enter, speak sensibly and have people listen.

James and Kotlowitz do treat their subjects seriously, listen to what they have to say and show how the activists are getting things done. For the inches of progress made before our eyes, it’s a hopeful film.

“The Loving Story,” on HBO, may seem like it is tied to Valentine’s Day. But it’s only providence that the couple at the center of the story is also named Loving.

But loving is the key. Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter were both members of a small community in Virginia where whites and blacks freely worked and socialized. They met and fell in love, and like anyone else might do, got married.

But there were laws in Virginia, as there were in more than a dozen other states, outlawing any such mixing of races through marriage, using a word that is as ugly as the prejudice, miscegenation.

Somebody called the cops and the happily married duo were hit with a felony charge in 1958 — and a year in jail – which would be suspended if they’d just leave the state. Any visits back to see family or friends would have to be done individually, lest they risk arrest. They decided to fight the law, not only for their own sake, but as Mrs. Loving says in the sweetest possible way, for other people as well — because “it isn’t right.”

“The Loving Story” is in some ways the exciting case of the two young American Civil Liberties Union lawyers who agreed to take the case on and brought it to the U.S. Supreme Court. But that’s only because lawyers like to talk, especially looking back at what they can now see was the biggest case of their lives. Although there is a surprising amount of footage of the Lovings in the film, they never do say very much. They just want the right thing done. And in the end, it is.

The two are not around to tell their story, though one of their daughters is. He died in a car accident in 1975; she in 2008 at 68, surrounded by family and friends.  The last anti-miscegenation law wasn’t repealed until 2000 in Alabama. Theirs is a love story that hasn’t been fully told previously — and may not have had a showcase had it not been for Black History Month.