True To Its Title, Netflix’s ‘The Politician’ Fails To Deliver On Its Promises

The Politician is the first show to surface from camp TV auteur Ryan Murphy’s record breaking US $300 million deal with Netflix: if it signals what’s to come, we’re in for a bumpy ride.

Like most of Murphy’s shows (Nip/Tuck, Glee, American Horror/Crime Story, Feud, 9-1-1), The Politician‘s log-line is intriguing. We follow Payton Hobart (Broadway star Ben Platt) as he climbs the ladder to his self-professed manifest destiny, President Of The Free World, with each season following a different election in his career.

We begin in high school, with the show’s trailer promising a mash-up of Glee’s ridiculous social ruthlessness with cult-classic film Election‘s dark look at student politics.

And it delivers, but in the in the dimly disappointing way politicians do — technically ticking the boxes, but never quite succeeding. All the elements promised are there (black comedy, camp plot-lines, melodrama, political commentary) but the results never quite add up.

Starting strong before running out of energy in the season’s latter half, The Politician makes some confusing decisions familiar to anyone who has watched Murphy’s shows before. There are too many elements, too many pointless plots or unjustified character motivations.

All of these flaws can be frustrating, but we also know by now this is how Murphy operates, and there’s a certain joy to embracing the chaos. Unfortunately, The Politician gets clunky as it sets up season two, doing something we didn’t think Ryan Murphy was capable of: it gets boring.

I Want You… To Edit Your Scripts

The Politician starts strong. We meet Payton (Platt) in the weeks leading up to his high school election, surrounded by a team of three friends who plan to ride and die with him all the way to the White House.

But as a series of double-crossing election setbacks come every episode, we see Payton struggle with his Frank Underwood leanings, and whether power means anything without any moral backbone.

Where House of Cards took everything so seriously, The Politician is sunshine-sardonic: the affluent world of Santa Barbara and Saint Sebastian college is as bright and colourful as Edward Scissorhands‘ pastel town, and just as brutal, too.

Plot lines are ridiculous. Characters commit affairs and plan assassinations at the drop of a hat; everything is life-or-death. The ridiculously high-stakes are reminiscent of, of all things, Kourtney Kardashian telling her sister that “there’s people that are dying” when Kim cries over a lost diamond earring.

The ultimate joke is that none of this really matters, and that it matters a lot. Kim’s superfluous earring is worth more than many lives; Payton will be president; the petty infighting of the powerful is the only true trickle-down in our world.

The ultimate joke is that none of this really matters, and that it matters a lot. Kim Kardashian’s superfluous earring is worth more than many lives; Payton will be president; the petty infighting of the powerful is the only true trickle-down in our world.

This is most clear when we escape Payton’s grasp for ‘The Voter’, an episode halfway through the season that follows Elliot (Russell Posner), an undecided voter on election day. Hounded by Payton and his competitor, Elliot, of course, ends up not voting: one of the school’s poorer students, he feels disenfranchised and bored by political games.

Better than voting for the side against him, we suppose, but the reality is, both teams are pretty much the same from where he stands. It’s not an original comment to make, but the show doesn’t overstate it.

If anything, The Politician forgets itself in its hustle, with the final three episodes moving past the election, betraying the show’s enticing log-line.

The Politician Made Me Like Gwyneth Paltrow

At the heart of The Politician is the story of a man whose humanity is corroded by his own ambition. Thanks to its cast, it turns that familiar fable into something fresh.

There’s a lot of pain throughout The Politician: in the show’s first episode, Payton’s dreamy lover and political rival River (David Corenswet) takes his own life. The moments where he and enemy/River’s girlfriend Astrid (Lucy Boynton) deal with that trauma — whether through anger, sadness or song — are really affecting, and keep the show tied to an emotional core for most of its irrational moments.

It’s a shame, then, that this isn’t dived into too much. Instead, the show adds too many B-plots and C-characters into the mix, leaving the season’s second half in tatters as it tries to clean everything up. Mess isn’t necessarily bad: the soapy elements of the show, such as everyone sleeping with everyone regardless of gender, are really fun.

The Politician is far from perfect, but it’s mostly enjoyable.

Some sub-plots are too tonally off, such as the unlikeable Astrid’s bizarrely sincere journey to independence, or misplaced, like Jessica Lange as the lecherous scamming nana of Payton’s VP candidate, the cancer-ridden Infinity (Zoey Deutch). Like Lange, the plot’s straight out of American Horror Story; Murphy has his satires crossed.

Add in latter season episodes involving a high school production of Assassins, murder and maybe Munchausen by proxy plots, and the whole thing lands so besides the point it’s hard to care.

On the other hand, Murphy’s other returning actress Gwyneth Paltrow near-steals The Politician as Payton’s loving mother. The character is a mixture of Margot Tenenbaum and GOOP-bullshit Gwyneth, and her mixture of fear and admiration of her son is heart-breaking. It’s one of her best roles in recent history.

When Pose, Murphy’s show set in New York’s ballroom scene, returned this year for season two, it shed a lot of its bigger names. Murphy’s been open and honest about hiring James van der Beek, Kate Mara and Evan Peters as a Trojan horse of sorts to create a show by and for trans people of colour. Having established its world (and ratings), S2 lost the outsider perspective and was all the better for it.

It’s tempting to say The Politician will also tighten in S2, and the flash-forward in the finale establishes that the right characters are in and out. It signposts we might learn more about Payton’s friends, equally ruthless and ambitious, even if their ambition is to stand behind him — a dynamic well worth exploring, and a supporting cast that’s well up to the task.

Then again, The Politician overshadows them by introducing the heavyweights of Judith Light and Bette Midler in its last 40 minutes. Even when it’s time to govern, the campaigning never stops.

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The Politician‘s first season is now streaming on Netflix.

Jared Richards is a staff writer at Junkee, and co-host of Sleepless In Sydney on FBi Radio. Follow him on Twitter.