‘The Politician’ is witty but confused
Review Creator Ryan Murphy returns with a show that is the jaded richer sibling of his earlier musical show ‘Glee’
When Netflix signed a mammoth production deal with Ryan Murphy, one natural question was: Which one of him would they get? The big-hearted storyteller of Pose? The gore-splashing fabulist of American Horror Story and 9-1-1? The drawn-from-life dramatist of Feud and American Crime Story?
Judging by Murphy’s teeming to-do list, they’re apt to get all of those and then some.
But what they got first was The Politician, out now, which recalls the Ryan Murphy of Glee. Like that high school musical, to which The Politician is the jaded richer sibling, it’s an acerbic Technicolor sketch of
The Way Teens Live Now that gets lost in its hairpin story turns.
The Politician is not a musical, though it stars Ben Platt (Dear Evan
Hansen) as the electorally ambitious teen Payton Hobart and is sensible enough to give him the occasional excuse to sing. But like Glee, it opens with a clear thesis statement. “People like to think of their presidents as characters we see on TV,” Payton says.
Payton, ambitious and tightly wound, has his character arc meticulously planned: Become student body president of his palatial private school in Santa Barbara, California, attend Harvard, yada yada yada, serve two terms in the White House. First, that means defeating River (David Corenswet), a friend turned intimate rival and confronting the possibility that he may just be a sociopath.
Murphy, working again with his
Glee partners, Ian Brennan and Brad Falchuk, has always made first-class pilots. The Politician pops off the screen immediately; it’s sumptuously appointed in production values and cast. (Gwyneth Paltrow plays Payton’s nurturing adoptive mom, whose portrayal of a billionaire earth mother seems to play wryly off Pal trow’ sown wellness entrepreneur career. Bette Mid le rand Judith Light materialise late in the season.)
Like Glee and last year’s ill-fated adaptation of Heathers, the series plays fast and cheeky with identity issues. Payton and his rivals — for the most part, rich and white — cynically play the diversity card. Payton’s advisers push him to choose a “differently abled” running mate. He settles on Infinity (Zoey Deutch), a working-class student, whose exploitative grandmother (Jessica Lange) oversees her cancer treatments in a storyline not a little reminiscent of Hulu’s The Act.
As a production, The Politician is an heirloom apple: crisp, tart and expensive looking. But something feels unconvincing in the details, and not just because many of the actors seem to have aged out of high school years ago. The students still receive college
notices by envelope and not by email. The pop culture references include Britney Spears.
More important, the show’s send-up of elections as bloodless, staged theatre, run by overprepared, bland candidates scripted within an inch of their young lives, feels quaint at a time when national politics has become a chaotic non sequitur production of Last Insult Comic Standing.
Of course, that’s if you take The Politician as a satire of politics, which in the end it may not be. What it captures most evocatively and viciously is the culture of overstressed, Ivy-besotted student achievers and dumb money.
The Politician seems to grow quickly
bored with itself, shifting tones and adding so many twists it starts to feel like improv.
For all the confusion, there are plenty of ideas here. Often there seems to be nothing but ideas, raised and dispensed with, elbowing aside character, emotional momentum and story coherence.
The series has enough wit and visual style, though, that it’s a pleasure to watch in the moment — just as long as you don’t think beyond the moment. The Politician is a bright and talented student of a show, eager to pad out its resume with extracurriculars. It, and its audience, might be happier if it finds its focus.