With the cautionary opening title card, “The Politician is about moxie, ambition and getting what you want at all costs. But for those who struggle with their mental health, some elements may be disturbing,” we’re given some inkling of just how sociopathic one must be to pursue politics (a quality Royal Tenenbaum [Gene Hackman] didn’t lack). Even if that psychological characteristic presents an interesting dichotomy when considering that the purpose of the politician is to help the collective (at least in theory if not in practice).
It is thus that we are introduced to Payton Hobart (Ben Platt, a Broadway heavyweight and natural Ryan Murphy collaborator), a ravenous-for-political-glory Santa Babaran with the perfect pedigree to get it. Adopted into a wealthy family by Keaton (Bob Balaban) and Georgina Hobart (Gwyneth Paltrow), Payton’s story is also enhanced by the fact he is “the only son of a cocktail waitress from The Landing Strip Gentlemen’s Club in Laconia, New Hampshire.”
His advantage of being “both rich and poor” as the perfect blend of all the presidents he’s studied in order to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses and emulate success doesn’t seem to impress the admissions interviewer he’s talking to at Harvard in the first scene. He writes off Payton’s naive enthusiasm for becoming the president as follows: “It does some to be the hot job everyone aspires to nowadays. The air of impossibility has been removed.” For what would any Ryan Murphy/Brad Falchuk/Ian Brennan production be without making a dig at the Trump conundrum?
Although Payton is clearly passionate, his fervor feels undeniably manufactured. For instance, when asked why he wants to attend Harvard, he states matter-of-factly, “Harvard’s produced more presidents than any other school. Seven.” You can guess that Trump was not one of them, beginning at Fordham (the same alma mater as Lana Del Rey) before transferring to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania–after conveniently being interviewed by someone in admissions who was friends with his brother, Fred. And while it might be flattering despite always having smoke blown up his ass about how impactful Harvard is, it seems this admissions interviewer is ultimately unmoved by Payton’s overly polished presentation, suddenly getting to the core of what’s really off about him by asking him when the last time he cried was. Payton claims it was last Christmas during It’s A Wonderful Life. The admissions interviewer counters, “Did you cry because you were moved or because you felt like you were supposed to?” So it is that we cut to the chase with regard to Payton’s problem in life (but ultimate weapon in politics): an inability to experience genuine feeling.
As his political campaign for class president (for the show seeks to follow Payton through every political campaign of his career) amps up, his cocksure plan to win is foiled when the more popular and attractive River Barkley (David Corenswet) announces his own intentions to run. It doesn’t help matters that Payton feels an added betrayal when factoring in that they’ve both been cheating on their girlfriends amid sexual exploration with one another. Well, Alice Charles (Julia Schlaepfer), Payton’s longtime sweetheart (it’s part of both of their plans to take the White House by being able to say they’ve been together since high school), is less aware than River’s cold, calculating girlfriend, Astrid Sloan (Lucy Boynton). Astrid who has long despised Payton and chooses to make it her mission to ruin his chances of the presidency once more when River kills himself and she announces she will run in his place with the same VP candidate, Skye Leighton (Rahne Jones), a gender non-conforming black student. Knowing full well that his only chance is an equally as noticeable VP, Payton goes for the curveball selection of Infinity Jackson (Zoey Deutch), a student who has been known to others as having cancer, though no one seems to know, precisely, what kind. Her lower-income status (made all the more apparent by her bombastically trashy grandmother, Dusty [Jessica Lange]) is also helpful to humanizing Payton, arguably the richest kid in school.
To that end, Payton’s interactions with his emotionally detached family members frequently smack of something out of the Wes Anderson playbook, most notably, The Royal Tenenbaums. With Keaton as something of a lesser Royal Tenenbaum figure and Georgina as the still ever-desirable Etheline (Anjelica Huston) not in love with her husband any longer (but instead, in yet another Andersonian twist, the fellow female equestrian she’s been spending quite a bit of time with at the stables), it leaves plenty of room for the children of the family to be dysfunctional. For yes, Payton is not an only child, but the lucky recipient of twin asshole brothers named Martin (Trevor Mahlon Eason) and Luther (Trey Eason). The latter two, of course, harbor infinite resentment toward Payton for his closer relationship to their mother (something like the way Margot [Gwyneth Paltrow, in a role that, incidentally, also finds her playing an adopted child like her future TV son, Payton] and Chas [Ben Stiller] do of Richie [Luke Wilson] for his relationship with Royal). Hence, it only serves their diabolical purposes when Keaton jumps out the window off of an expensive chest of drawers known as the Harrington Commode after Georgina tells her she’s in love with Brigitte (Martina Navratilova). For it enacts a clause in their prenup that states Georgina–and, by proxy, Payton–will get nothing should she leave him for another person. With a calm reaction delivered with the perfect blend of Margot meets Etheline rationality, Georgina essentially surrenders her claim to any money while insisting Payton ought not to be punished for her sins. But the Psycho Twins later iterate to Payton that because of pangenesis, he will never be a true part of their bloodline. It’s some real Nazi-inspired shit (even if the theory originates from Hippocrates and Darwin).
Deadpan tone, issues of how important genuinely being related to someone or not is (Richie Tenenbaum knows about the significance of that better than anyone) and drenched in detail-oriented luxe aesthetics aside, The Politician doesn’t just raise questions about how our families play a role in fucking us up, ergo what we end up becoming, but also just how much we have a tendency to always strive for the lifestyle we did not grow up with. Astrid, of course, is the most shining example of this in the series, as she grapples with the strange cruelty of her father, Theo (Dylan McDermott), as driven by what her mother, Lisbeth (January Jones, mercifully returning to the role of a blacked out housewife), calls a latent desire to fuck his daughter. Or that’s what she tells the police upon Astrid’s disappearance under suspicious circumstances. Presumed to be kidnapped, Astrid has merely forced Infinity’s not so bright ex, Ricardo (Benjamin Barrett), to take her to New York City, where she feasts on Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. and sex with as much avariciousness as any tourist, commenting of Ricardo’s bedroom skills, “I’d always heard that dumb people were better at sex. Why do you think that is? Maybe it’s because you’re not always thinking about other things so you can just be, like, present. Now get back into bed and give me that big, dumb wiener.”
Having fled only because of her intense feelings of being stuck among the pressures of Saint Sebastian High School and her father’s domineering insistence that she win the presidency at all costs, her sudden fading into thin air is actually a boon to her campaign with Skye, all too happy to presume Astrid is dead and take things over herself. Payton, in the meantime, suffers one PR disaster after another despite not being nearly as incompetent as Trump. Nor is his devoted team consisting of Alice, James Sullivan (Theo Germaine) and McAfee Westbrook (Laura Dreyfuss)–all of whom are blindsided by the information that, in the end, through all the scandals weathered and tactics tried, Astrid withdrew from the race to render Payton’s win “pyrrhic.”
Once again, Murphy’s opinion on the 2016 election comes through in Astrid’s caustic line, “You’re president, so you have won something: an office with no meaning, which no one can respect.” The sudden spiral of Payton’s formerly oh so secured life path is compounded by yet another assassination attempt (involving, at one point, a requisite iconic scene from Jessica Lange dancing to Shirley Bassey’s “[Where Do I Begin?] Love Story”). And then, all at once, he’s gone from secured Harvard acceptance to slumming it at NYU in the season finale, set three years into the future from his tragic election loss. As a student at said institution, it’s only natural that he becomes a floundering alcoholic, spending his nights playing piano at Marie’s Crisis and waxing “poetic” about that moment when you’re supposed to know if you’re truly a New Yorker or not (gag). This, believe it or not, paves the way for Bette Midler and Judith Light–that is, the introduction of their characters, Hadassah Gold and Dede Standish, the latter being unopposed in her decades-long win of the Senate seat in New York. It is the spurned McAfee who calls it to Payton’s attention that he might actually have a chance at beating her in the impending election. He just has to campaign. Something he’s been skittish about since his loss, and something that he knows will make him no longer feel as profoundly as he has been of late (though that might just be the effects of alcohol). Feelings that are tapped into by his frequent conjurings of the long dead River.
And yet, he cannot deny that he was born to play this part. To be a politician. With each episode offering not only seemingly endless narratives in one, but also a bleak look into how politics really operates even at the “lowest” level (though rich high school kids really are the true future leaders of America, so it’s not low-level so much as starter kit), Murphy, Falchuk and Brennan are sure to serve us up more lurid storylines detailing just how much the incongruous is normal in that alternate realm called the road to garnering political power. With Midler and Light in the mix for the setup of season two, it’s going to get plenty lurid, to be sure.
