As to plot setups, among the “how are the mighty fallen” revisionist biopics of national figures who fall from grace, just out is HBO's Paterno, written by Debora Cahn, John C. Richards and David McKenna, about Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. “the winningest coach in college football history,” whose career ended amidst a child sexual abuse scandal. The difference here is that the main character was not himself involved in any inappropriate liaisons, but seems (just going by Wiki) to have simply failed to do more than report the matter internally, where it was predictably buried. The concern here is the broader issue of institutional cover-up (the theme of the 2015 award-winning newspaper drama Spotlight).
The issue of failures at the institutional level also comes up in the 'officer involved shooting' plot setup occurring in dramas that are either fact-based or typical of incidents that seem to be happening weekly in real life, and which often lead to urban riots. Director Reinaldo Marcus Green says his feature debut Monsters And Men, about the police shooting of an unarmed black man in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Bed-Stuy (Spike Lee's old homeground) "is inspired by the ongoing epidemic of race-related police brutality cases. It's talking about the cycle rather than one particular case because these things are happening all the time - it's happening everywhere, and I didn't want it to feel like one isolated thing.” Similarly, the hour-long CBS drama [The] Red Line, written by Caitlin Parrish and Erica Weiss, “explores what happens after a white cop in Chicago mistakenly shoots and kills a black doctor.” The 10-episode Netflix drama Seven Seconds, created by Veena Sud [The Killing showrunner], follows events after a white police force covers up the hit-and-run of a black teenager by a Jersey City cop. These are examples of the 'ripped from the headlines' approach to contemporary drama.

Kathryn Bigelow's period drama Detroit, written by Mark Boal, focuses on the 1967 race riots prompted by police brutality. Also out in the US is Chappaquiddick, written by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan, about the 1969 political scandal that ended Ted Kennedy's presidential aspirations of continuing the family dynasty. The Front Runner, written by political journalist Matt Bai, Jay Carson and director Jason Reitman, based on Bai’s book “All The Truth Is Out”, opening on Election Day Nov. 6, covers the 1988 downfall of Democratic presidential nominee Gary Hart following press coverage of an extramarital affair he denied.
Sam Greenlee’s 1969 spy novel The Spook Who Sat By The Door, described as ‘the first black nationalist novel’ (and filmed in 1973 adapted by Greenlee and Melvin Clay), is being developed as a tv series [no writer yet]. This has the CIA’s first African-American hire discover he is only an equal-opps token hire when he is assigned to the photocopy room, and return disillusioned to his Chicago gang roots to politicize gang members to fight in the Black Revolution. (The 1973 film evidently had its release suppressed by the FBI, cf here.)
The notorious 1969 'Manson Family' cult murders, at the height of the hippie culture, of actress Sharon Tate Polanski and several others in LA forms the background of the latest Tarantino film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, which focuses on people on the fringe of the showbiz community. (Manson himself died in prison, age 83, some months ago - which put the story back into the headlines.) Season 2 of true-crime series Mindhunter is reportedly to focus on Manson. The killings are also the subject of Charlie Says, a feature premiered at the Venice Film Festival, scripted by Guinevere Turner (the screenwriter of American Psycho) from books by Ed Sanders and Karlene Faith, on the involvement of a prison worker in the rehab of 3 'Family' women.
The killings are covered from a more supernatural angle in the feature The Haunting Of Sharon Tate, written and directed by Daniel Farrands. The pregnant actress, tortured and murdered by the Manson Family gang, apparently had premonitions of being killed by a satanic cult. There is also Tate, a feature drama to be made by the husband and wife team of Michael Polish and Kate Bosworth, on the actress's life rather than her death.

Left: The Post. Though set in 1971, the drama reflects ongoing American concerns about official lying.

Left: David Simon's 8-episode HBO series The Deuce.

All this unease about contemporary trends has inevitably created a nostalgia for the [imagined] good old days. A number of popular tv shows from the 1960s-80s, such as Lost In Space, Cagney & Lacey, Dynasty, Magnum P.I., and Murphy Brown are getting reboots. "Networks and streaming services are increasingly pulling from the past to flood the airwaves with reboots and remakes," - Dr. James Francis, Jr., The Conversation. (Even the recently rebooted-and-cancelled Roseanne may be recommissioned by ABC without the now PNG'd Roseanne Barr herself, as The Conners.)

A particular opportunity for nostalgia currently being revisited is the US space program, whose glory days were in the 60s.
First Man, adapted by Nicole Perlman and/or [accounts vary] Spotlight-scriptwriter Josh Singer, from the biography First Man: A Life Of Neil is about astronaut Neil Armstrong’s career ending with his being first man on the moon, in 1969. There is also an indie film titled simply Astronaut, written and directed by Shelagh McLeod, now in post-production. This has Richard Dreyfuss as a senior citizen who lost out on his chance to become an astronaut when young, but now has a chance to rekindle his dream via a nationwide competition to win a space trip.

Left and above - FX Channel's Trust: The story setup offers another 70s-era tie-in motif, the generation-gap clash over lifestyles and values, and the artwork reflects this. (Getty, considered the world's richest man, was obsessively frugal but collected paintings and presented himself as an arts-supporting philanthropist.)

Left: Sicario [2015], currently being sequelled [see below]. In the aerial shot at left is a stretch of the border wall between US and Mexico that is now much in the US news.

The 2015 Sicario [above] was a grim portrait of the US administration sinking into the mire of the cross-border drugs war, with the sequel, Sicario 2: Soldado [below] evidently ramping up the ruthlessness of the [un]official response.

Whereas the first Scarface dealt with bootleg champagne etc as the great moneymaker in Prohibition America, the 1980s remake had its gangster characters deal in cocaine brought in from South America, for this was by then the drug of choice for those who could afford it. Cocaine has continued to distort American society, as Sicario shows.
Season 2 of FX’s Snowfall, created by John Singleton & Eric Amadio and Dave Andron, will cover “the early days of the crack cocaine epidemic and its ultimate radical impact on the culture … of Los Angeles as we enter 1984.”

Also possibly drug-related is the inspiration for a surreal ‘social thriller', Sorry To Bother You, the debut feature of musician-turned-filmmaker Boots Riley. Here, a California telemarketer “discovers a magical key to professional success, which propels him into a macabre universe.”

Driven, the John DeLorean biopic written by Colin Bateman (The Journey) is also drugs-related, with the collapse of the maker of the sports car featured in the 1985 Back To The Future being due to trying to raise some needed millions for his car-making company via cocaine deals. The press notice describes is as a “wickedly comedic look at a bromance gone bad.” (DeLorean was caught via his good-buddy relationship to a criminal turned FBI informant).

Re the USA’s biggest current who-are-we national-identity-crisis controversy, the enforced separation of immigrant children from their parents, there is at least one related work in development, an MGM/WB film, scripted by Tracy Oliver. from Nicola Yoon’s YA bestselling novel The Sun Is Also A Star, about a Jamaican girl in New York who falls in love just before her family is about to be deported back to Jamaica.
An instant nostalgia has evidently set in re Trump’s predecessor, and there is a new Obama biopic feature in the works for 2020 release. Two 2016 indie films [Barry and Southside With You] already covered his early years, but this will cover his two presidential terms. Based on the just-out but already bestselling memoir by Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes The World As It Is, its producer (Likely Story’s Anthony Bregman) describes it as “The Right Stuff by way of Frank Capra, and it’s exactly what we need.”

At the lower end of the economic spectrum, we also have Americans struggling to make ends meet in the face of medical etc bills and being led to desperate measures, perhaps drug-related. (Breaking Bad may have been a trendsetter here, though the plot setup often also reflects the Thoreau quote about the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation.)
In The Mule, written by Nick Schenk, a bankrupt 90-year old (played by Clint Eastwood) takes on a driving job which turns out to be acting as a drug courier for a Mexican cartel. In post-production [and not to be confused with an earlier horror film of the same title] is the indie thriller All Creatures Here Below, written by David Dastmalchian, which uses the young-couple-on-the-run plot setup. ABC's False Profits pilot, set in the world of cosmetics marketing, written by former Code Black writer-producer Kayla Alpert, is described as “Desperate Housewives meets Glengarry Glen Ross. It follows a team of down-and-out women in suburban Arizona.” Claws, TNT's “darkly comedic series about five manicurists in a South Florida salon” may be comparable. In writer-director Courtney Moorehead Balaker's feature Little Pink House, based on the nonfiction book, a Connecticut nurse campaigns against a corporation abusing 'eminent domain' rights of way to bulldoze homes in her working-class neighbourhood, the case going all the way to the US Supreme Court.
The Fall Of The American Empire is Quebec filmmaker Denys Arcand's belated follow-up to his 1986 adult-conversation drama The Decline Of The American Empire. This has an academic reduced to working as a delivery driver to make ends meet and stumbling on terrible temptation - a pile of cash from a hold-up gone wrong. Actor Paul Dano has described his directorial debut Wildlife, adapted by him and his partner Zoe Kazan from the novel by Richard Ford, as being about the American dream as ‘something that I’ve found just really beautiful and hard’. The plot has a teenage boy in 1960s Montana witnessing the breakdown of his parents’ marriage.
Writer Kevin Williamson’s 10-episode series Tell Me A Story is based on an Argentinian series but set in today’s US (Williamson: “we are living in “rage America” where everyone’s so divided”), using fairytales as springboards. Here, ‘The world's most beloved fairy tales are re-imagined as a dark and twisted psychological thriller set in modern day New York City, the first season of this serialized drama interweaves "The Three Little Pigs," "Little Red Riding Hood," and "Jack and the Beanstalk" into an epic and subversive tale of love, loss, greed, revenge, and murder.’
With the economic crunch, the idea of 'downsizing' one's lifestyle is a popular idea. The premise of the satire Downsizing, co-written by director Alexander Payne with Jim Taylor, is to take the idea literally, with the protagonists scientifically reduced to 5” high to save expenditure on resources, but - according to the reviews - discovering social problems persist regardless in their new small-scale planned community.

Here And Now, an HBO comedy-drama series by Six Feet Under creator lan Ball, described as “a provocative and darkly comic meditation on the disparate forces polarizing present-day American culture” evidently proved over-ambitious for a mainstream US audience, with its diverse domestic setup involving “the members of a progressive multi-ethnic family - a philosophy professor and his wife, their adopted children from Vietnam, Liberia and Colombia, and their sole biological child - and a contemporary Muslim family, headed by a psychiatrist who is treating one of their children.” (There's also a supernatural aspect.) It has not been renewed but Season One is still out there [trailer here].

Another 'all-in' melting-plot setup seems to be Universal TV's ensemble drama The Village, written by executive producer Mike Daniels (Sons Of Anarchy), about residents of a NYC apartment building interacting. ("All under one roof are a recovering war vet, a pregnant teenage girl and her single mom, a cop with an unexpected love interest, a woman hiding a terrifying secret from her husband and a millennial lawyer who might find his grandfather is the best and worst roommate he ever could have hoped for.") The premise seems to be all-human-life is here, at least as found in contemporary America. (The setup where protagonists, having moved away from their birth family, find social support in the big city via their work colleagues or room-mates is of course nothing new.)

Finally, Steven Spielberg is remaking West Side Story, once described as "the souring of the American Dream wedded to Romeo and Juliet." The new adaptation is by Tony Kushner, who previously worked with Spielberg on Munich and Lincoln.