Six months into its run, “The Trump Show” has generally tended to hew to existing stylistic conventions. Occasionally, an episode has run long, but they overwhelmingly stick with a conventional structure, with an A plot involving the protagonist, President Trump, and B and C story lines that focus on members of his family and his associates. The stories themselves are often outre, as if “The Trump Show” is trying to compete with “House of Cards” and “Scandal” to see which series can sell audiences on the most dramatic twists and cliffhangers. But “The Trump Show” is generally conservative in its underpinnings: The episode generally kicks off with a weekend tweetstorm, proceeds with some conventional business and then moves on to a new revelation that the administration inevitably escalates.

So it was intriguing to see the series try something new in its 26th week, centering an episode, “Interview,” around what was effectively a long monologue Trump delivered to three minor characters, Peter Baker, Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman who work for the show’s imagining of the New York Times. “Underground” set an extraordinarily high bar for this sort of episode in April, with an episode that consisted of a monologue given by Harriet Tubman (Aisha Hinds) to an audience of white abolitionists. Making a tightly focused episode like this can be a challenge for the show’s directors, in terms of providing continuing visual interest. And it’s an exceptional task for any actor to try to pull off: Even for people accustomed to the spotlight, holding that much attention, with minimal foils to play off of, for 40-odd minutes on a broadcast or basic cable network drama (or a whole hour on a premium cable drama) is a draining enterprise.

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But, as has been the case since the beginning, “The Trump Show” is built around an actor who thrives under these conditions. Indeed, Trump bristles when it seems that one of the supporting players is even temporarily getting more attention than he is. That can be an irritant during the weeks when the show-runners of “The Trump Show” are trying to create a balanced drama that includes positive roles for the series’ supporting characters. It also means that “The Trump Show” can tackle a format switch of this difficulty without worrying about overtaxing its leading man.

Because of this tendency, I don’t know that “Interview” will ultimately rank as an all-time example of this sort of episode; though it’s a break in format, it also feels like an inevitable outcome of Trump’s desire to dominate every single episode. More important, what Trump does in this episode isn’t so much a radical revelation as a confirmation of the traits that define him, and that the show includes in every episode.

That said, this is still an effective episode of “The Trump Show” in particular and of television in general. And perhaps because it’s not radical, it’s useful to look at as a piece of craft.

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The writing for Trump himself is particularly strong. Take this section of the dialogue, on health care: “We have some meetings scheduled today. I think we have six people who are really sort of O.K. They are all good people. We don’t have bad people. I know the bad people. Believe me, do I know bad people.” The progression here is fascinating: Trump casts doubt on the characters of the people he’s discussing, then affirms them before pivoting into a dark rumination on Trump’s own encounters with evil. It’s a series of sentences that reinforce Trump’s self-proclaimed right to judge everyone around him even as it reveals his compulsion to acknowledge his familiarity with the darkness he denies participating in.

Trump’s preoccupation with dominance showed up in a different form in his recollections of his visit with French President Emmanuel Macron, a character who the show has sometimes treated like an anti-Trump and who has been willing to challenge Trump on the terms Trump claims to prefer. Their handshakes have become struggles to prove who is tougher, which Trump seemingly tried to recast as something sexual. “He’s a great guy. Smart. Strong. Loves holding my hand,” Trump mused. “People don’t realize he loves holding my hand. And that’s good, as far as that goes.” It was an immensely complex moment in the episode, one that attempted to cast Macron as a feminized supplicant but that didn’t veer into the expression of disgust one might have expected from a character of Trump’s age and political temperament. Instead, Trump portrayed himself as a sophisticate who can tolerate an irritant. As with most of Trump’s efforts to recast signature moments, it wasn’t entirely sophisticated, but it was still revealing.

And the episode captured Trump’s penchant for non sequitur in a fantastic detour into European history. Trump, speaking about Napoleon’s accomplishments, declared, “And his one problem is he didn’t go to Russia that night because he had extracurricular activities, and they froze to death. How many times has Russia been saved by the weather?” “Extracurricular activities” is one of those juicy phrases that can have multiple meanings and still doesn’t quite fit here despite the available options. “The Trump Show” isn’t generally a comedy, except in a horrifying way, but this was an opportunity for the series to be purely funny.

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In terms of supporting players and visual interest, “Interview” was fine, if not outstanding. The Haberman character in particular did an unusually interesting job of soothing Trump while leading him down the sorts of lines of inquiry that made for revealing, unnerving answers. Her personal touch, at moments like the one where she called Trump’s bodyguard by his first name, or got him to talk more about his reception in France by agreeing with him, helped move the episode along. Even the visual diversion involving Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and his granddaughter Arabella “Baby” Kushner illuminated one of Trump’s more obscure ideas, his belief that genes are destiny.