The Politician, Netflix
The Politician probably had the best opening sequence of a sitcom that I can remember.
Payton Hobart tells his principal that after he wins the election to be school president, he wants to be a professional politician.
Not having a very high opinion of Hobart, the principal agrees that the “air of impossibility has been removed.”
Hobart agrees but notes that the age of a celebrity presidents stretches back to Ronald Reagan and did not originate with the present incumbent.
Hobart reasons he is the ideal candidate because he is from both rich and poor backgrounds. His family, of course, is outlandishly rich but he was adopted. He is also the only son of a cocktail waitress.
And so begins the Payton Hobart journey to the top. It’s kind of House of Cards as a farce.
Season Two has just been released on Netflix and Hobart has moved on from school politics and set his sights on the Senate representing New York.
Three things stand in his way. Firstly, he’s a terrible politician and has no grasp of the issues. Second, he’s up against accomplished Senate majority leader Dede Standish who’s got a 10-point lead on him. His final difficulty is that his mother is running to be governor of California and she is stealing his “sparkle.”
“It’s like being the moon beside the bright sun in daylight,” he tells her.
There are a couple of star turns here also. Bette Midler plays Hadassah Gold, the crazed chief adviser to Standish and Gwyneth Paltrow plays Georgina Hobart, Payton’s mum.
She’s a kind of left-wing Donald Trump combined with some Brexit-like proposals for California.
She rages against “dishonest journalism and the right-wing media” and advocated that California, the largest economy in the US, should leave the union and declare independence.
“We are never going to change them … we are in a bad marriage and when you’re in a bad marriage you get a divorce,” she says in a campaign debate.
Unlike some neighbouring states, she does however respect New York and they would be most welcome in a new union with the Golden State
Meanwhile, Payton is looking like losing the New York election until a bit of gossip falls into his lap. Standish is involved in a three-way relationship – a ‘Throuple’ - and Payton is willing to tell the world about it unless she withdraws
from the race and pledges her support to him.
Ben Platt is excellent as Payton, the wannabe politician who can’t just be himself (“I have no self,” he tells his advisers) and Bette Midler is outstanding as the manic Hadassah, leaving me wondering why we haven't seen more of her in recent years.
****
Newsnight, BBC 2
There was no Glastonbury to send the BBC hordes to his year, but it didn’t stop them relegating their flagship news analysis programme to the tea-time slot.
Kirsty Wark got the job of competing against Channel 4 News at 7pm last Friday to make way for a night of repeat performances from Glasto through the years.
Perhaps this has happened before and I missed it, but it seemed a humiliation for a show that sees itself as a cut above the rest.
To be fair, there have been previous experiments on Friday nights. For around a decade, Newsnight lasted only for 30 minutes on a Friday, before transforming into Newsnight Review, a look at cultural and artistic Britain.
Perhaps competing with Channel 4 News is the appropriate place for a show that has lost its way and has long stopped being a place of insight and enlightenment.
