The first season of Netflix’s The Politician was seven episodes of dull, meandering satire, capped off by a very engaging finale that set up another season featuring the always-welcome Judith Light and Bette Midler. That left me in a very particular place of really looking forward to the second season of a show afterward strongly disliking the first.
So does two of The Politician live up to the potential of the attractive teaser?
No. It doesn’t.
Perhaps even over the disappointing first season, the second season of Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan’s Netflix comedy is a hollow and perplexingly stale glimpse into American politics. From the episodes, several conducting under 40 minutes, The Politician is practical escapism in a minute of general cultural distress, nor does that have anything vaguely insightful to say about our electoral process — an unforgivable sin for a show airing within an election period.
The season picks up using a month to go in Payton Hobart’s (Ben Platt) run for the New York Senate seat occupied by long-time incumbent Dede Standish (Light). Payton is 10 points down in the polls. Still, his dogged group — such as intermittent girlfriend Alice (Julia Schlaepfer), electricity trio McAfee (Laura Dreyfuss), James (Theo Germaine) and Skye (Rahne Jones), and the strangely present Astrid (Lucy Boynton) — believes they could make up the gap if Payton pushes an environmental message he may or may not think inside.
For their part, Dede and chief of Staff Hadassah Gold (Midler) must get past this election that Dede might be tapped as Beto O’Rourke-Esque Tino McCutcheon’s (Sam Jaeger) vice presidential running mate — each one of which supposes the media doesn’t figure out Dede is at a polyamorous relationship with Marcus (Joe Morton) and William (Teddy Sears).
Many familiar faces also have loosely connected roles in the action for lovers of the very first season. Zoey Deutch might have a busy movie career, but she looks in several episodes as an Infinity Jackson with no real similarity to the character we met before. And Gwyneth Paltrow has a long arc because Payton’s mother, Georgina, is in the middle of a run for California’s governorship, allowing the series to double back on implausible elections doesn’t care about.
The first season of this Politician was all about Payton attempting to locate his authentic self, a difficult task since the show’s opening credits remind us that Payton is something of an automaton: a synthetic or robotic structure driven by ambition little longer. The following season repeats the same beats and the specific same narrative arc as, once again, Payton is designed to locate his aforementioned authentic self.
The matter is that Payton is bothersome and relatively awful, and the show hasn’t discovered any way to exemplify his peers have committed themselves to him thoroughly. Though I guess it’s easy to comprehend why his election staff comprises nobody he didn’t go to high school with, since there’d be no means of understanding why his generic ecological message would resonate with anyone, or why anybody would buy that this was a platform acceptable to get a random country Senate candidate. The”Young people don’t vote, but young women and men care about the environment” subtext feel gleaned from a headline to a post nobody read.
Other than one mention of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, The Politician doesn’t exist in our present political reality in any way, perhaps because the time jump accelerating Payton from teenaged high-school president candidate to 20-something say Senate candidate puts us sometimes in a nebulous future.
It is all nebulous, and The Politician continues to be the very first Ryan Murphy production — although Murphy headed no episodes this season and just co-wrote that the premiere — without a substantive link to the zeitgeist. An episode trying to ditch”cancel civilization” and politicians getting caught having done blackface is additionally a year behind the curve. The show’s eccentric pride in stating”throuple” over and over again, as they had tapped into the latest in outré sexuality, is straight-up unhappy awarded the founders’ track document. And it’s a puzzle why the lumps in Payton’s heritage have been smoothed out entirely, and the series’s LGBTQ+ personalities have been the funniest by the season two-story.
The actual world is coming apart at the seams, as well as The Politician dedicates a significant quantity of its time to debate the rules and approach of rock-paper-scissors. And here is the thing: This subplot is the best part of this season. That is how edgy The Politician remains currently. Despite a roster of directors wrapped out of the Murphy-verse, the visuals do not pop in the fashionable way the very first season occasionally did.
The cast remains a reason — probably the only reason — to watch The Politician. Light is smooth, persuasive, and, unlike many Platt with Payton, makes her character feel like you can practically envision both presents in the actual world and being elected into office. Midler strives hard to get laughs from flimsy stuff; she sometimes succeeds and sometimes just flails. Throw in an under-utilized Jackie Hoffman as Dede’s grouchy secretary. There’s a 9 to 5-fashion series about women of a specific era attempting to stay relevant in politics that I would prefer to this one.
Platt remains a problem for me. I don’t recall the last time I watched a series mistreat its leading man, making Payton sweaty and unlikable in only intentional ways. The star comes to life when Payton has to sing; however, the season pushes his only two tunes to the finale. The same musical prefer it hasn’t been achieved for Platt’s Dear Evan Hanson co-star Dreyfuss. However, McAfee has the season’s funniest showcase episode since she revolts against her toxic proximity to both Skye and James with an unfortunate date. Boynton has razor-sharp delivery, and with summit Murphy/Falchuk/Brennan dialog, I believe she would be magnificent. However, the team behind Sue Sylvester and too many trenchant Emma Roberts personalities to count somehow can’t afford Astrid anything biting.
All these seven episodes of The Politician boundary on formless make no convincing attempt to graph the state Senate’s momentum attempt to its silly conclusion. Other than the cast — seriously, Light and Midler and Hoffman are always a treat to watch at work — the one thing that let me get into the end was the terror that the finale would, again, leap forward in tease an enticing third time. Luckily, it doesn’t. There is no evidence that anybody involved is particularly interested in such a thing. I know I’m not.
