It’s becoming clear that, 30 years into his career, Ryan Murphy views television shows, at least the ones he oversees, not as shows but as a list of checkboxes: A lengthy collation of popular ideas and opinions to be ticked off one by one, jammed into chapters clocking in at roughly 40 minutes and spare change, strung together in seasons comprising 7 and 10 episodes. This is as true of “American Horror Story,” a series apparently made to show off how much he likes horror (so much, it turns out, that rather than celebrate one sub-genre each season, he celebrates all of them), as it is of “The Politician,” now in its second season on Netflix, his insufferably smug attempt at skewering American politics along generational lines, cultural lines, topical lines, and any line connecting these lines together.
Excess happens to be the least of the show’s problems. Frankly, the absence of a moral center, or even a driving ideology, turns an otherwise typical Murphy production into a spectacle of jaw-dropping tone-deaf nonsense. “The Politician” presents as a window into cynical politicking, a hard glance at how the sausage is made during election cycles and in the everyday execution of official governing duties, but it’s every bit as calculating and soulless as the concepts it’s critiquing. Murphy and his usual cohorts Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan argue the youth are the future, the generation that’s invested in saving the planet from, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, the decades its sires spent making thermodynamic love to fossil fuels. In fairness to the sires, this is partially true but also requires cherrypicking evidence, so it’s also partially bullshit.
But hey, the young are just as two-faced, underhanded, and driven by victory at all costs as the boomers, so let’s all sneer at the millennials, too! Reckless ambition, facilitated by the gathering and subsequent spilling of dirt on political opponents, dominates the plot of “The Politician,” as default protagonist Payton Hobart (Ben Platt) furthers his campaign against New York State Senate Majority Leader Dede Standish (Judith Light), aided in his mission by his friends and a rotating lineup of lovers: Alice (Julia Schlaepfer), his girlfriend, McAfee (Laura Dreyfuss), James (Theo Germaine), and Skye (Rahne Jones), his three-headed campaign management team, Andrew (Ryan J. Haddad), frenemy and inside man at Standish headquarters, and Astrid (Lucy Boynton), once his rival, now the mole for Standish’s Chief of Staff, Hadassah (Bette Midler).
Standish has her own team apart from Hadassah: Her husband Marcus (Joe Morton) and their lover William (Teddy Sears), who combine to make a throuple, a word used so much throughout the season that it starts to feel like darning needles in the ear after about the third time. Standish can’t abide a 22-year-old rich kid trying to stand her up and take her seat; Payton can’t really get over the dissatisfying whirlwind of his run for student body president at his snooty high school in the first season, and also, perhaps, genuinely wants to change the world for the better. But he can’t without being a snake in the grass by threatening to expose Standish’s love life, a take on how politics function in this dumbass country that’s at once so moldy and self-satisfied, Murphy’s only chance at saving “The Politician” from its central bromide would be having an actual opinion.
He does not, in fact, have an actual opinion. “The Politician” stages the same brand of melodrama at the heart of most everything he’s authored in his latter-day as a creative mind and a showrunner. That might be fine if the melodrama didn’t dovetail, whether consciously or unconsciously, with piles of clichéd political punchlines, the low-hanging fruit that makes up the majority of the show’s humor. Everybody is literally in bed with one another; the characters all have their own competing agendas because politics is a game meant only for enterprising egomaniacs. They’re all fake as hell, putting on a face, or in Payton’s case faces, to get what they want, the way they want it, bemoaning all the while the very inauthenticity they’re willingly enacting for the sake of percentage points.
“The Politician” is frustrating enough for its cheap, expired political comedy, but it’s plainly infuriating for burying an actual, meaningful argument beneath cheap, expired political comedy. The tension between the youth vote and the 50+ vote is very real and very relevant to the moment we’re living through, extending from now all the way up to November when voters have to choose between a tyrannical, titian-shaded crybaby asshole and a doddering, old-fashioned, gaffe-prone, alleged sex criminal at the voting booth, which hardly feels like a choice at all and only qualifies as a choice because a second term for the crybaby asshole would be the last nail in the coffin for the dying experiment we call democracy (not to mention the planet we live on). Now, that’s a story!
But Murphy’s too interested in taking the “both sides” platform and in scoring easy laughs by taking on cancel culture, ageism, sexism, aggrandizing boomers, whiny millennials, and obsessing over the rule of three: Apart from the throuple, Astrid and Payton are in a relationship with the ghost of River (David Corenswet), the boy they loved and who took his own life in the premiere episode; James, Skye, and McAfee can’t get out of each other’s personal lives no matter how they try; Payton’s mom, Georgina (Gwyneth Paltrow), is sleeping with Alison (Kelly Fulton), who’s funding Georgina’s own political campaign in California, and Tino McCutcheon (Sam Jaeger), the Junior Senator-Elect from Texas whose presidential aspirations put Standish in his sights as a possible running mate. It’s the seediness, the kink, that Murphy fixates on more than an actual message, which sends a message unto itself: He doesn’t care, and neither should the rest of us. [D]
“The Politician” Season 2 is available now on Netflix.