Netflix’s ‘The Politician’ is back for another cynical run, but the snark attacks get tiresome

Last year’s polling data on the first season of Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan’s Netflix series “The Politician” came back somewhat mixed, as it should have. This cynically satirical series, which charts the political rise-fallrise cycle of a supremely confident and self-interested young man named Payton Hobart (Ben Platt), takes an all-too-easy theme (politics is corrupt) and stretches it well past its usefulness or comic potential. “The Politician,” as the kids says, is a lot.

Owing its tone and stylistic approach to a chaotic blending of Wes Anderson, Tracy Flick and Selina Meyer (and speaking in Murphy and company’s native tongue of speed-sass), “The Politician” has apparently ignored some of the voters’ feedback on Season 1.

The show almost certainly needs fewer characters but has instead added more. And instead of getting some breathing room, the remaining oxygen is spent running in circles for all seven episodes of Season 2 (which premiered Friday). Rather than sharpen its cleverest ideas, it unleashes several more half-thought scandalous subplots, most of which have to do with sex.

It’s a romp, after all - a show about people who’ve lost any semblance of moral compass, which, as TV viewers in the 21st century, we should be plenty used to by now, whether this lack of goodness is personified in dramas, comedies or our actual breaking news.

It’s entirely possible to watch “The Politician” and not know whether its take on politics is meant to be meaningful and relevant or - and this may be the better way to enjoy it - completely and coldly meaningless. “The Politician’s” burn-it-down regard for all politics is a tired stance and a bit off topic in the current moment, which so badly needs a rebuilding of good politics and good people.

Let us fall back, then, to the show’s only sure defense: It’s a comedy.

In that regard, there are plenty of campy pleasures here. After his life veers in a direction he never expected (his dreams of Harvard dashed; his high school political career in tatters), Payton ended up at New York University at the end of Season 1, happily apolitical until his loyal toadies (Laura Dreyfuss and Theo Germaine) convinced him to run against an incumbent state senator, Dede Standish (Judith Light). The second season picks up with that campaign.

There’s no understating the immediate way Light’s presence (along with Bette Midler as Hadassah Gold, Dede’s conniving chief of staff) lifts “The Politician” into a more crackling realm. Payton and his advisers immediately take to New York-style dirty politics, upsetting Dede’s ambitions to join a Texas senator’s presidential ticket. Dede’s personal life is a minefield (as we learned in Season 1, she’s secretly part of a “throuple” with two male partners), but Payton’s past is also exploitable - such as the photograph of him when he was 6 years old, dressed as Geronimo for Halloween.

“I’ve never met anyone whose enemies take so much pride and pleasure in destroying them,” one of Payton’s staffers observes. “People really hate you.”

Everything that first seemed smart, snarky and on-point about “The Politician” begins to wear thin; the jokes that it makes - as well as the contemporary reallife debacles it lampoons - are too easily made. (The old observation that “This stuff writes itself” also holds true for the binge viewer. Shows like this tend to enjoy themselves, exclusively, as you zone in and out.)

As with last season, “The Politician” is at its best in an episode about the actual voters who exist far outside of the campaign war rooms. Last season, “The Voter” was a deeply apolitical teenage boy who cared little for the school election battles that raged around him - a voter who could not be reached.

DEAR ABBY » My fiance, “Jay,” has a 14-year-old daughter who has been home-schooling during the quarantine, and she refuses to put pants on. When we ask her to, she gets upset. She isn’t built like the average teenager. Abby, she’s 5’10” and weighs 200 pounds, so it’s like seeing a grown woman in her underwear.

I think it’s inappropriate for a young woman her age to be unwilling to dress herself fully, and I don’t like seeing her like that every time I go to their house. Jay doesn’t notice. He says it doesn’t bother him, and he doesn’t mind when I ask her to put shorts on. I don’t feel it’s my place at this point to dictate what she wears, but I’m uncomfortable. I don’t know if I’m crossing a line or if it’s normal to feel this way. Help!

— Didn’t think I was a prude

DEAR DIDN’T » Your fiance is OK with his daughter’s attire in their home. If your engagement to Jay leads to marriage, you will be living there permanently, so your opinion should be respected. Someone has to have “the talk” with your fiance’s daughter about the fact she’s no longer a child; she has become a young woman. The person to do that is her father. The message would be better coming from him because you’re not her parent, and it may help you avoid being perceived as the “wicked stepmother-tobe.”

Dear Abby is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips. Contact Dear Abby at www.DearAbby.com or P.O. Box 69440, Los Angeles, CA 90069.