According to Sydney Blumenthal on salon.com:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/11/08/apologies/print.html...
Once a Republican mole filched a copy of the script, the Republican Party chairman, Ed Gillespie (former chief lobbyist for Enron), assumed the disinterested pose of historian. The owl of Minerva perched on his shoulder, he called on CBS to yank the series or put a warning on the screen that would flash every 10 minutes that it was make-believe. (The script put words into the mouth of Reagan/Brolin about AIDS sufferers: "They that live in sin shall die in sin."
In fact, Reagan said, "Maybe the Lord brought down this plague," because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments.") CBS promptly crumpled before the pressure campaign, pulling the show from the network schedule and assigning it to Viacom's cable channel Showtime. Leslie Moonves, the CBS president, abased himself with ritual abject apologies. In the battle for control of imagery, CBS was no match for the RNC. The Republicans know far better than a network the ruthless business of going negative.
"The Reagans," from leaked excerpts of the script, features a distracted Ronnie and harridan Nancy, a melding of 1950s situation comedy, starring the hapless but lovable dad, and the campy 1970s Grand Guignol of "Mommy Dearest." Policy and politics are not its centerpieces.
Certain crucial events in the rise of Ronald Reagan are noticeably missing. His actual words on race and civil rights, essential to his political success, are absent, though the RNC chairman has not complained about that.
Consider just a few true-life scenes that never made "The Reagans": Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (calling it "humiliating to the South"), and ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to wipe the Fair Housing Act off the books.
"If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house," Reagan said, "he has a right to do so."...