THERE is a fabulous series on Netflix. It is delicious to the senses, endearing in its evil ways. It is about these creatures called politicians. The show itself bears the armor of that name: The Politician.
The vaulting ambition begins in a high school in Santa Barbara, California. Our leading man is this wealthy high school student Payton Hobart who, early on, has decided and accepted what he feels is his destiny—to be the president of the United States of America. Along the way, he has to secure his slot with Harvard.
The journey is tortured and yet, for Payton, certain. One of these twisted paths is the local politics he must face in his own school. There, he embarks on a candidacy that either (a) puts to shame hardcore politicians or (b) makes us think that corruption and viciousness are really the product of the kind of schooling we subject our children to.
In the days leading to the election, we are exposed to the manipulations and machinations of the candidates. The passion these young men and women share with such toxicity lead to personal conflicts, which screech to a dead end. The characters, however, find their way out only to create again more troubles for themselves.
But to talk about this series only in terms of youthful ambitions (oh to be young and to be corrupt) is to forget that this show has been developed by
Ryan Murphy (with Ian Brennan and Brad Falchuk) who brought us series like Glee, Pose and The Boys in the Band.
He is also the mind behind Feud, which resurrected, through the glitzy bravura and bravado of Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange, the feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.
And who should greet us in Season 1 of this series but Jessica Lange herself, playing the grandmother who convinces her granddaughter that she has cancer. A grandmother from hell with big hairdo to boot, Lange is Dusty Jackson, a woman whose moods and movements are accompanied by the songs of Shirley Bassey!
In Season 1, Payton is running for president and he is finding it difficult to find a running mate. He finds it in Infinity Jackson. Across the aisle, a candidate who is gone (let me not say what caused his disappearance) is taken over by his girlfriend, Astrid. It takes a while to for this young woman to find a vice-president. But she soon settles for a colored candidate.
There is so much flip-flopping in this election that one wonders whether these young politicians are looking to their adult counterparts as role models, or is youth really the wellspring of virtues and vices necessary in political life and ambition?
As the narrative unfolds, the gimmicks and agonies of these candidates and their teams are so real, we forget we are watching a mere school election. Credit for us being lost and dutifully immersed in this juvenile purgatory to true political hell is the cast.
Led by Ben Platt, the cast is composed of many first-timers who are all stellar. Platt can dance and sing; he has perfect angst and he can act. He honed his craft in musical theater, with Dear Evan Hansen uppermost to his credit. That play is now a film with Platt reprising the lead role. In The Politician, he begins as this brat-nerd who is naturally scheming and goes on to be introspective in Season 2, where he runs again for a political position.
Supporting Ben Platt is a batch of colorful actors in the variegated sense of it, beginning with Zoey Dutch as Infinity Jackson. As this manipulated victim of a terminal illness, Dutch as Infinity builds herself up from a truly tragic figure, then to a pathetically annoying casualty of her own artlessness. How she rises from the muck in Season 2 is as much the function of the script as Dutch’s quirky charm. Then there is Astrid, the wealthy girl who is hot and fashionable and lovely, but who discovers that the fakery in her family is not only in conscience but in class as well.
Pardon this term, but there is an actor in this series who prepares us for the things to come when it comes to gender and identity. This is Theo Germaine who, as James Sullivan, is one of the tacticians for Payton. Theo Germaine is a non-binary and, thus, uses the pronouns “they/them” and “he/him”. Completing this band of intrepid actors are Laura Dreyfuss as McAfee, Julia Schlaepfer as Alice, and Rahne Jones.
Gwyneth Paltrow, subdued but terrifically incendiary, is Mom to Payton. She is married to a rich man but soon leaves him for a butch aviator played by Martina Navratilova.
In Season 2, Payton and his high school friends and enemies become one as they fight the older, real politicians. It is set in Albany, New York, and here we have two natural scene-stealers (mainly because they are given roles to chew on): Judith Light as Dede Standish and, behold, Bette Midler. Sophisticated, wise beyond her political ideology, Light’s forever-winning senator is glum and glam combined. She is so used to victories, she has rested on her gilded laurels.
With a name like Hadassah Gold, Midler’s public relations maven can ease herself into a situation and squeeze herself out of the stickiest corner. Midler has moments of kilometric lines she delivers with aplomb, as if she can hear an applause after each pause, or period.
For all the entertainment value of the series, it is dangerous to watch The Politician because you are disarmed by what we are supposed to arm ourselves against—the obnoxiously osmotic power of these people whose sole business is to govern us and make us powerless.
The Politician streams on Netflix.