SPOILERS BELOW.
If you have six and a half hours to kill, watch Netflix’s new show The Politician. It features superb acting from an all-star cast (Ben Platt, Gwenyth Paltrow, and Jessica Lange, just to name a few), and the show’s comedic moments are some of the funniest scenes on television I’ve seen in a while. At one point, Infinity Jackson (more on her in a minute) demands an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris. “Right now I wanna go to the restaurant in Ratatouille, the one where the rat cooks,” she says, prompting her grandmother to reply, “That’s an animated film, Infinity! Rats don’t actually work there!”
The show follows a high school student named Payton Hobart whose life’s goal is to become the president of the United States one day, and to do that, he decides he needs to win the class presidency. His opponent is his secret lover/tutor/emotional confidant River Barkely, who is running more because his girlfriend, Astrid Sloan, thinks he should than out of his own motivation. Twenty-five minutes into the first episode, however, River kills himself, leaving Astrid to step up to the plate and challenge Payton. Payton’s advisors include his girlfriend, Alice, and his two best friends, McAfee and James, whose trust he loses and gains throughout the show. The fact that Payton’s running mate, Infinity, may not actually have cancer and is being poisoned by her grandmother certainly doesn’t help the already troubled campaign (Infinity, by the way, was my absolute favorite part of the show. Thank God for Zoey Deutch).
Although The Politician is of undeniably high quality, the way the show treated its female characters left a sour taste in my mouth. Alice, Payton’s girlfriend, seems to have little personality other than being in a relationship. Payton’s name needs to be cleared? Alice fakes her way through a lie detector test, using the mental image of her and Payton hooking up on the way to his presidential inauguration to do so. Payton runs for Senate? Alice leaves her fiance at the altar to play the part of the doting Senator’s wife. Although she never feels like a two-dimensional character (thanks in part, to a talented Julia Schlaepfer), she’s certainly not the “stone-cold bitch with ice water in her veins” that the show wants you to believe she is.
The other women hardly fare any better. Georgina Hobart, Payton’s mother, spends most of the eight episodes caught between being a love interest and being a mother. After graduating college, McAfee commits political suicide for Payton to run for state senator. Skye, River’s VP, is sent to jail. In what I found to be a particularly ironic scene, Payton sets up an event to support his anti-harassment platform, but like all other parts of his campaign, it’s a stunt designed to get him votes. He doesn’t necessarily believe in any of it, just like the show doesn’t actually care if the female characters have three dimensions.
Yet the women in his life, including mortal enemy Astrid, flock right back to him in the last 10 minutes of the series, even though he’s a borderline alcoholic with no real gumption anymore. They convince him to run for state senate, despite having a politically savvy and more qualified McAfee on the team. McAfee doesn’t run: she can’t, because ultimately, this show is about Payton, the white dude.
But you get it. Watching the show, you understand how Payton pulls people into his destructive orbit. He goes from a breathy, teary mess in one moment to the smoothest talker Saint Sebastian High School has ever seen in the next. Ultimately, you root for him to win the presidency, because he’s that good, and a lot of that comes from Ben Platt’s incredible performance. He’s magnetizing, and if nothing else, you should watch the show just to hear his rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “River.” The Politician, for all its faults, is still a great show, and well worth the binge.