Snark Squad Pod #088 – The Politician (2019- )

Nicole Sweeney 0:01
[OUTTAKE] Played by played by Ben Platt, wow, great. Peyton Hobart… [stumbles over words] Why?

Marines Alvarez 0:15
Hello and welcome to Snark Squad Pod, a media podcast full of friendship, feelings and snark. My name is Marines.

Nicole Sweeney 0:22
I am Nicole Sweeney, and this week we are joined by Sam also known as the Democracy Diva.

Democracy Diva 0:27
Hey everyone, thrilled to be back.

Nicole Sweeney 0:28
Sam is joining us once again to talk about The Politician which is Ryan Murphy’s first show on Netflix slash last show with Fox. This show is about a young man named Peyton Hobart who is played by Ben Platt. In this first season Peyton is running for student body president initially against a very popular and athletic kid named River who Peyton previously hooked up with. River dies by suicide at the end of the first episode, and River’s girlfriend Astrid then like moves into running against Peyton for student body president around Peyton there is this sort of whole like infrastructure that he has built up for this race for student body president. Alice is his girlfriend. McAfee and James are his two other sort of like best friends. Zoe Deutsch is also in the show playing a girl who believes that she has cancer but through melodramatic shenanigans, it is revealed that her grandmother played by Jessica Lange is poisoning her. Gwenyth Paltrow is also in the show as Peyton’s adoptive mother. The whole thing, like plot wise, I don’t really know what details to share because it is like a lot happens and none of it really matters or means anything. Over the course of the season, people do outlandish things for dubious reason. Peyton ultimately becomes student body president, but then has to resign in disgrace after it is revealed that he knew that Zoe Deutsch’s character was being poisoned and didn’t go to the police with that information. And then in the finale, we fast forward three years and find this formerly ambitious and intense kid to be sort of floundering in college, and then is given new life and purpose as his friends rally back together to set him on the path to his next campaign, which will be Season Two of the show. And that is my attempt at a plot synopsis.

Marines Alvarez 2:35
Yeah. I saw this trailer and I was immediately like, we should do this and also Sam needs to be our guest. Because that felt like like a good fit. And after watching and hearing that the plot synopsis, I just feel like we’re going to have a lot of feelings. But we’re going to start where we always start and just like a quick gut check about whether or not you enjoyed the series, Sam.

Democracy Diva 3:01
No. I did not enjoy this. And I was really excited about it. As Mari said, like, I mean, I don’t want to say that like I was prime audience for it because that feels monstrous, but given that I am a musical theatre nerd who’s worked in politics, a show about Ben Platt doing political shenanigans like yes, does sound up my alley. So I was excited about Ben Platt doing things. I was worried to see what Ryan Murphy would do when given millions and millions of Netflix dollars and nobody had to tell him No. And it turns out exactly what you would think Ryan Murphy would do. I have a lot of friends love this show and I am struggling to understand if we even watch the same program. I know a lot of overly ambitious political kids, and I know a lot of musical theatre nerds and none of them act in any of the ways of anybody on this show. I have never seen anybody burn through plot like this, and I used to watch Glee and Scandal so that’s really saying something. When Nicole said melodramatic shenanigans and her Plot summary, I really think that that could be the plot summary for the entire season. Yeah. Why does this happen? Oh, melodramatic shenanigans. So that’s my initial, no, I did not like this and I am very excited to talk about why.

Nicole Sweeney 4:27
I have weird and conflicting feelings about it. I don’t think I liked it. I also definitely don’t think I feel as strongly about it as Sam does. This season is a mess., but it was also an oddly compelling mess that I didn’t really want to look away from. Like I was, I don’t know, I was enthralled by the nonsensical shenanigans, but also why the fuck did literally anything happen ever. So I don’t know. I am conflicted.

Marines Alvarez 4:58
I think conflicted describes me too. I have a feeling that as we talk about it, especially like the more negative pieces, and we look at them closer, my feelings will start to like, sway more negative. It was a mess. It just was throwing plot out at you so rapidly, and we only had eight episodes. So just from a construction piece of it was wild. And then when you kind of come back from it and look at it further away, just what it was trying to say like I have no idea. If it was being ridiculous with like some sort of like message, I feel like I would have been able to process that more. But like Nicole said, like, nothing matters. And it was doing all of these ridiculous things. And I’m not sure why exactly. But then the cast was so well cast, and they’re charming and it was really easy to watch because it is so quick and ridiculous. So just like stepping away from it. I was like, Huh. And then it does a thing right at the end where it kind of resets you from season one in season two, and then hooks you in all over again, because there’s like a new race going on or whatnot. So the premise or I guess the conceit is that each season will follow a different race in Peyton’s life, presumably leading up to like the presidential election. So they reset, um, between the seventh and eighth episode to go into season two. And I feel like I’ll watch it. But I’m not sure that I’ll enjoy it.

Nicole Sweeney 6:25
Yeah, I have 100% am ready to watch future seasons. That’s– however I felt about this, however mixed I felt about this first season. I’m committed. I am intrigued enough by everything that I saw that I am down to see what happens after the sort of reset to see what happens in the second season. I also really appreciated it in part because one of the first things that I saw people complaining about on Twitter back when they the first trailer for this came out is just the very idea of Ben Platt playing a teenager I saying his name is going to murder me today. It’s fine. But the idea of him playing a teenager is indeed ridiculous. But once I got to the last episode and realized like I was like okay, yes, yes, I now I understand the conceit. I got it. We had him do this for one season and then now we’re going to him up. I appreciate it that as well.

I actually agree with all of that. And because the one of the only things I liked about this season was a lot of what happened in the last episode, I actually am also looking forward to season two, despite hating this season. And I will continue watching if only because I mean, this is a train wreck you cannot look away from, truly.

Yeah!

Democracy Diva 7:39
Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t make any sense. Nothing that happens can be tied to any logic. But like, it’s the aesthetic is incredible. Most of the actors are unbelievably great, um, and so who cares that they’re just like, you know, dolls in a dollhouse being played with by Ryan Murphy, like, like, you know, the show doesn’t need to be more than that. But I think because it also does want to be more than that and doesn’t do that successfully, I really have a hard time like getting behind it. I mean, Ben Platt is incredible, like truly unbelievable performance. The age thing though, does still bother me because like, yes, by the end, I got it. I was like, okay, we’re doing time jumps, like that’s why literally all of these people are 27 instead of 16, however, I still had to watch a full season of all of these 27 year olds pretending to be 16. And, you know, it’s one thing to not have them looking like high schoolers, but to also have everyone acting like they’re Don Draper is like insane to me. Do we want to unpack whether Peyton can feel emotions or not? Why he sometimes can and sometimes can’t do we want to unpack what it means to be a good person, if it’s more than just doing good things about you have a selfish, you know, a motive for doing that. Like, I am very interested in that idea, and the show does try and go there, but while having every single main character attempt to murder or be attempted murdered by someone else in the cast, like really undercuts my ability to play with any subtlety in the messaging. Because, like Nicole said, things happen and none of it means anything. You would think the nihilism in this show would be like the cruel political backstabbing machinations. No– the nihilism and this show is that the things that happened to the people in the show do not matter at all. However, if you look at this season as one really, really, really long pilot for the rest of the show…

Nicole Sweeney 9:47
Right!

Democracy Diva 9:48
It works a little bit better.

Nicole Sweeney 9:50
Yes, yes. I do think that the piece about whether or not like he can feel things and, and how that kind of plays out with his ambition, and that is the part of it that worked best in terms of doing something actually trying to sort of say something, it didn’t always land. But I think that is where it got the closest, I think his scenes with ghost River and his scenes with his mother, that were sort of set to that purpose, tended to work fairly well for me. My biggest problem in terms of whatever it is that we were trying to explore with Peyton, not entirely clear, but is that the degree to which all of the people around him keep insisting that he wants to make the world a better place, but we don’t–

Democracy Diva 10:39
We never see that.

Nicole Sweeney 10:40
We never see that! Like I never saw Peyton earnestly want to make the world a better place. But everybody, everybody else keeps saying that he does. And so that piece of it was tricky for me.

Marines Alvarez 10:54
It’s interesting to me because in today’s like political climate where you have like the Parkland students and Greta who are like really championing for things that they believe in and that affect them directly that their– the politics in this show called The Politician were so empty. Ot was really hollow. And and that insistence that, you know, Ben Platt’s character was trying to save the world and make a difference also was hollow and I again, this is where not everything needs to mean something I get it, but I kept asking myself like, what are they trying to say like, we know that students can be politically motivated and really believe in causes. These particular ones didn’t always or at least Peyton didn’t always. He was just kind of hitting on on like buzz topics, you know, and kind of like going around and around those circles. And it’s just really interesting to me too, because like Peyton’s whole thing of like, maybe he doesn’t feel emotions or process emotions as people typically do. it interesting that you then cast Ben Platt who just is so like soulful, has such like emotion in his face, and you’re like heart really just go out to him. So some of the times where he was supposed to be just like, acting woodenly, or, or whatnot didn’t come across that way to me entirely, even though ultimately, I enjoyed his performance and I think he did a good job.

Nicole Sweeney 12:19
That for me worked like the opposite of how you are describing, which is to say that I don’t know how much there is to this character on the page, but I always felt like there was more going on there, just because of everything that Ben Platt was bringing to the character. So I don’t– like I agree with everything that you are saying, except I, for me, it landed in almost the opposite way, if that makes sense.

That’s actually how I felt about something you said earlier in terms of what working best for you being some of the moments in between Peyton and his mother and Peyton and River in terms of doing the work of the emotional, what is Peyton’s deal? What is good and evil? Sort of thing.

Right, right.

Democracy Diva 13:00
I think– I think what made those scenes fail for me was that they were very understated quiet moments, especially Gwenyth Paltrow and the guy who plays River are really playing, like performing style that’s very close to the vest. And so when you jump from that to a scene of Jessica Lange and her sunglasses, dancing and screaming and drinking, it’s like what the fuck show am I watching? The tone– I couldn’t, I couldn’t take the jumps in tone, from the like campiest campiest campiest scenes imaginable to like quiet moments of people trying to you know, understand whether they’re good or not, because it didn’t feel like those very vastly different tones ever got threaded together. It just felt like I was watching scenes from wildly different shows.

Marines Alvarez 13:52
And– and tonal shifts are possible. And like I was thinking about watching something like Fleabag, in which some of the most like Ernest moments that the main character was having wasn’t very comedic situations. Like there was a like that men’s camp where they were all learning how to treat women properly, or as human beings or whatever. But she has like the sit down with somebody there and has like a really earnest conversation. So it’s something that is like, embedded in the humor that was already present in the show. Where here the tonal shifts were just like wild. They didn’t like there was no thread to follow as you’re saying. So just it felt like it was skipping around to me in a way that was jarring rather than like added texture or layers to the to the show.

Nicole Sweeney 14:38
I kind of enjoyed the sort of like, I don’t know, tonal chaos of the show. I think this is part of why I feel conflicted is that for me, the tonal chaos of it was something that I– I found mesmerizing in this way that I can’t call good, but like I still enjoyed watching. I think that’s that is where the heart of my my weirdly conflicted answer at the beginning, but I also have to preface this by saying that not long before I started watching this show, I finished reading Emily Nessbaum’s “I Like To Watch,” which I’m probably going to keep bringing up. Our next episode of the podcast, I 100% will be talking about this book aain. It’s– Emily Nussbaum is a TV critic for The New Yorker, so it’s basically just a collection of some of her criticism over the years. It’s very, very good and it’s also very, very related to like the project of this podcast. So I apologize in advance to the audience of this podcast for how many times I’m going to talk about this book. That being said, the book ends with her profile on Ryan Murphy, which she spent a year working on and it’s the– I listened to the book on audio and it’s like a lot of the chapters are like 10 to 20 minutes this Ryan Murphy chapter is an hour and a half long. All of which is to say that it is hard to ignore the like Ryan Murphy-ness of the show and that is like a very strong sort of presence. And I was struck by how much the– how much Payton reminded me of I don’t know if this is I know very little about Ryan Murphy beyond like his shows and then this one profile that you know that I’ve now read, but the similarity is there, I guess, between this character and the little that I know of Ryan Murphy and like these this this question of you know, his ambition versus his emotion and whatever I’m like I don’t like this feels feels related in some in some kind of ways. And so I’m curious Sam because I know you have some experience with Ryan Murphy shows how that kind of affected your experience with this show.

Democracy Diva 15:05
I have experience rage quitting Ryan Murphy shows. That would be accurate. I believe I rage quit Glee sometime in season three when they did a Christmas episode where everybody conveniently forgot that Rachel Berry is Jewish. I think that was the last straw for me.

Nicole Sweeney 17:02
Yeah, fair, yes.

Democracy Diva 17:05
It’s an okay personal last straw, although I could see that for the, um, on the spectrum of what Glee did man that was mild. But but so as I said before, like I did go into this with this expectation. Actually, my best friend texted me about the show right before I started watching it. My best friend who I grew up doing theater with and she was like, you have to watch it. It’s crazy amazing. And like completely insane.

Nicole Sweeney 17:32
Oh my God.

Democracy Diva 17:33
And I was like okay. You know, I’m already committed to watching it for a podcast anyway. So I’m about started, but I have a feeling it’s going to be like every Ryan Murphy show were like maybe the first episode or even up to three is like incredible and then it just totally falls apart. And she was like, No, that’s totally not true. Later did I find out she had only watched the first episode when she told me that. Thanks, M, this is why we’ve been friends for 26 years, I guess. I don’t even know that this had like what “Glee” had which was like an amazing pilot, a really good episode two and three, and then like everything you like about the show so slowly disintegrated after that. This kind of was so up and down from the beginning that I wasn’t quite sure where to go with it. But yes, it felt like what happens when you give Ryan Murphy too much creative license. In a weird way. It reminded me of some of the mistakes of the Gilmore Girls revival, not because they really have anything in common, but because some show runners really benefit from people around them to tell them no. And I think Ryan Murphy really could use some more people to say, “uh, no, dude, that doesn’t make any sense.” And I think Amy Sherman Palladino can also use someone to be like, “did you really put a talking bird in this scene? What’s up with that, Amy?” Lik, it’s just, there are parameters that I think certain show runners really need that they might get in network TV and that you do not get when you get a multimillion dollar streaming deal and a lot more creative freedom.

Nicole Sweeney 19:08
Not just a multi million dollar streaming deal– like famously the biggest deal in television.

Marines Alvarez 19:14
With a guaranteed season two, like he knew going in there was going to be season one and season two.

Nicole Sweeney 19:20
Which does also give you a lot of incredible things right it gives you this camp aesthetic– this like Wes Anderson meets Lisa Frank vision to this thing that is like so bizarre to look at and really interesting and visually appealing. Gwyneth Paltrow wears so many fucking capes in this show, it’s amazing. And you also get everybody on the show is queer. And like this show isn’t about everybody on this show being queer. It’s just a fact of life that like everybody’s queer. And as someone who runs in communities where that is significantly true, like it is such a relief, to have characters just be all over gender and sexuality spectrums and have that not be a very special episode, which is what Ryan Murphy was doing 10 years ago. So I appreciated that. I have one complaint that’s like, kind of just discreet and specific, but but I want to throw it out there. This entire show is premised on Payton since he is seven years old, not just wanting to be president, not just knowing he’s going to be president, but doing all of the work to get there, which is kind of an interesting take on, you know, a child, or maybe would be if it was an actual 16 year old playing that character and not a fully grown adult. But I digress on that. However, once he wins, and goes up against the school board and starts making requests, he is not at all prepared for what is the most obvious question a school board will ask you when you come to them with a proposal, which is how much money does this cost? He acts as if the entire world has turned upside down because the school board says, okay, but how much does that cost? The Peyton that this entire show describes would have been crunching the numbers and had 75 Excel spreadsheets and like a color coded coated Leslie note binder of how much of this would cost and how he is rich enough to pay for it all so it wouldn’t actually cost the school district anything like something like that. And so to watch the entire show, and really his entire, at least political career at the high school level, all fall apart in one meeting with the school board where he realizes that he can’t just wish things to existence that really made the show fall apart for me because it wasn’t believable that Peyton wouldn’t at least be ready for the very first question they asked on, you know, any of his proposals. So again, it was like it gave you all this backstory to make you believe that anything happening in this show could be believable, like you have to buy this whole, you know, pre-packaged politician thing in order to buy that there would be like multiple assassination attempts on this guy.

Right, right.

Democracy Diva 21:58
But it also completely falls apart in terms of the person who would actually have done all that work, knowing how to handle an extremely simple school board meeting. So that was it was infuriating to me. That is all.

Marines Alvarez 22:13
I think that goes back to like kind of what we’re saying about, you know, the the haziness of what story this was trying to tell exactly. It wasn’t just that Peyton’s ambition is the thing like he just wanted to win, but then that’s negated by everyone around him, assuring him that he’s trying to make the world a better place. So I don’t know if there’s a disconnect in between how everybody perceives him and how he actually is or if it goes all the way to the writing and that they didn’t know what they were doing. But there definitely is that like gap between what we’re seeing as an audience and what the show is telling us is happening.

Nicole Sweeney 22:49
Yeah, and I think going back to Sam’s complaint, something that I saw in some reviews of the show is, I don’t know maybe a sense of frustration that we don’t really explore why Peyton sort of is this way– that like nobody in his life questions this ambition. And that to me, that is one of the few critiques that I actually am I feel sort of dismissive about because I think kind of the campiness of the show dismisses that, like, I think that I’m okay with. I’m okay with the sort of larger trappings of we’re not really going to question how we got to this particular moment in time. But if if I’m willing to disregard all of that other stuff, then you have to, like at least carry me forward. I am willing to suspend a ton of disbelief, but the show keeps making really lopsided asks.

Marines Alvarez 23:40
I think that there’s a lot of places also where I feel that are both of these things– are things that are campy and weird, and I’m willing to suspend disbelief, but then it asked too much of me or something in the messaging is slightly off. We touched briefly on River and that character, and how he’s running up against Ben, and then dies by suicide, and then sort of acts as his ghost conscious throughout the rest of the season. And like, I’m okay, accepting that, you know, Peyton sees this ghost throughout the series, and we’re never really told why or what not. But the idea that this character who we’re immediately like, you know, drawn to and is immediately like, set up as the man of the people and the one who feels where Peyton doesn’t feel anything, dies by suicide, and then that’s like a launching pad for other people’s characters. Like Astrid runs in his place and then Ben uses him as like the ghost conscious throughout and I was just like, we’re not we’re not going to– okay, cool. Cool, cool, cool. This guy just died so that everybody else kind of uses him as a tool in the story. And so everything that I liked has a little like side like that where I’m like, but however, I didn’t like this piece of it.

Democracy Diva 25:00
I think what I’m struggling with– I don’t want to have a mediation on camp because it’s not the Met Gala. But in doing camp in 2019. If you don’t do things with a certain self-awareness, or a certain wink and a nod, it’s just cheese and it’s not camp. So if you’re going to have a dream ghost give me a “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” musical number about a dream ghost. But you can’t just have an actual dream ghost be like Payton’s conscience in this like campified, insane, crazy show and like expects all these different levels to just kind of magically work. I think, I think this problem is happening with a lot of shows right now, but I think it’s particularly egregious here that show runners are are directing towards the GIF. Like, like, show running decisions, plot points, writing, character moments being crafted around, okay, what meme will go the most viral? Well, it’s obviously like Jessica Lange, screaming and dancing and talking about how gays munch butts and celebrate Halloween, which like, yes, is that, you know, do we all want a giff of that? Yes, we do. But it felt like every character was like, forced into moments like that just felt like nothing. They felt like we were supposed to all go, Oh, that sounds like like, there were so many moments like that, that felt like we were supposed to have this response of, you know, click and share. And it just get forced distance between me and the show. And I think that also is what made a lot of these huge disparate levels and tones not work for me.

Nicole Sweeney 26:41
I think that this is sort of a running theme of this whole conversation of this sort of, yes, this but also this experience of watching the whole show, you know, as you pointed out, the thing about the there being all of these queer characters, and they are queer, and that is simply a fact that it’s not a thing that we have to have these various special episodes about. And there’s a level on which that was like really wonderful and affirming to have that experience. But then also, you have the experience of this show, taking a major character’s suicide, or at least, you know, appear to be a major character in the first episode, that character suicide, handled in a way that felt at times very sort of icky and uncomfortable and not uncomfortable, because I was like, like, there was something thought provoking just like uncomfortable.

Democracy Diva 27:29
Yeah, River’s suicide is the launching pad for everyone’s ambitions.

Nicole Sweeney 27:34
Yes.

Democracy Diva 27:35
And that’s not really dealt with for more than a second, because as we have said, ad nauseum nothing is really dealt with for more than a second. And we deal with it with Peyton a little bit, but we never deal with it with Astrid, who also uses this as a jumping off point for her. We never deal with it with with sky, the running mate, who uses everything that happens around her to further her own ambition. And well, um, it’s a really dark view of, you know, like, every young person who cares about anything must have an evil, ambitious plan and vendetta. And again, like, there is a story to tell there, but when you burn through all those plots so quickly, that nobody feels any consequences or, or deals with any of those emotions, then you’re really not telling that story.

Nicole Sweeney 28:24
Right.

Democracy Diva 28:24
Even with the idea of there being so many queer and fluid characters, I feel like it in two instances, it didn’t quite look at an issue in the eye. That, you know, again, it’s par for the course when you’re watching, but it did leave me kind of like, well, you didn’t say anything about it. And it’s the fact that, you know, Peyton is, I guess, hiding his relationship with the River. I don’t want to say in the closet, because I don’t know, to what degree that’s true, but part of his, like, you know, running for president is not directly talking about that and he even threatens river with, like, outing him to, like, you know, win or whatnot. And then at the end, we have the New York State senator who they’re all like rallying around the idea that she’s in a thrupple to use against her, which I understand is like a very probably political thing, right? You know, this is not something that would play well to the American masses or the constituency or whatnot. But it never really looks at that. It just kind of weaponize it and then keeps moving.

Yeah.

Nicole Sweeney 29:29
I do also want to talk about the wonderful cast. There are a few people in this cast who I had never seen in anything before and most of his classmates and they were all really fantastic. I mean, what exactly were they asked to do? I’m not sure, but whatever that thing was, I enjoyed watching it.

Democracy Diva 29:50
Yeah, I agree. You know, again, it’s still hard for me to get her get around to like how many different shows these people were acting in but I thought a Payton’s, you know, best friends and campaign staff in particular. I think McAfee is like the the only character that I felt like was actually maybe a person.

Nicole Sweeney 30:08
Yes. She was the closest to consistent like the things that she was doing across the season all have– here is a consistency to it. The same person would make these choices.

Democracy Diva 30:19
Exactly right. Right. I’m not saying that. Like she has more humanity. I’m saying like she is recognizably, not a robot or Cyborg, which is not true for almost anybody else on this show. Also, everything she wears is unbelievable. And I love it all. I do wish that some characters weren’t suffering from just like chronic underwriting, it was really hard to ever understand what was motivating Astrid. It was really difficult to understand what was motivating Infinity. Those characters, I just felt like there was like entire scenes missing or weak. You know, we got scenes with them that I didn’t need. But the scenes I needed were like explaining what the fuck was going on in their brains that kind of why they would, you know, want to be involved with any of these people.

Nicole Sweeney 31:05
Right.

Democracy Diva 31:05
And I never, I never really figured out. I never really figured out why Astrid made any of the decisions she did. I certainly don’t understand what made them all come back and get the band togethe at the end. I understand why McAfee and James would would be there for Peyton in the end, but Skye tried to poison him, so I don’t understand how she made it back there. Astrid and her always hated each other, so I don’t know what she’s doing there. Infinity, I just feel like seems like she should get the fuck away from all of these horrible people and her horrible childhood and just kinda do her own thing, but that’s kind of just my wishes for her based on everything she’s been through. I think another thing I struggled with in the, with the time jump, and the three years later thing is, you know, we’re supposed to believe that he’s floundering at NYU. And I don’t know if this is me as a person who works in politics, but who always like wished she could be on Broadway, that like Ben Platt, as piano lounge singer, seemed like a way better lifestyle than what he was living before. Like, I can’t tell how much of like me wanting to singBilly Joel in a piano bar I’m like, projecting onto this, because there is a lot of that…

Nicole Sweeney 32:17
Yeah, I just I just want to say it’s, it’s a there’s a lot that I would…

Democracy Diva 32:23
However, I know, I recognize that like he has a drinking problem and like, you know, all of these things, but– he’s aside from the drinking problem, which is not something that we should just put aside, but he seems happier and healthier at NYU than he ever did when he was running for office. So is that the point? Because if it was that I don’t feel like we dealt with that. And if it’s not the point, then I’m really confused as to how we were like, oh, Peyton, it’s so sad that he’s lost his way. It’s like, did you forget that he was a monster before? Like, at least he’s only hurting himself now and not anybody else? You know, I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but it certainly doesn’t seem like like a fall from what he was doing before. And at least it’s a lateral move to me. So I had a hard time with with that. I also had a hard time with like, all I want is for Ben Platt to be a singing all the time. I would like to be clear more Ben Platt singing is a good thing. Does that mean any of it made any sense in this show at all? No, no, it does not my friends. Also we were expected to believe that Ben Platt had or I’m sorry that Peyton had never done that before. That his first time ever singing he could just completely nail River by Joni Mitchell and like his high you know tenor belt and just be perfect and move an entire room of people to tears and then he’d be like, Oh yeah, hey, maybe I do like singing and you’re like, no! Be Platt, it took you 26 actual real life years develop that singing voice you cannot expect Peyton the character to have it without even bothering to try. So that and again like a you know a TV show about politics with it with a subplot dedicated to the musical “Assassins” by Stephen Sondheim should be exactly my brand. And yeah, like every every subplot, including the Assassins musical doesn’t make any sense and is shoehorned in for the purposes of, well, it would be really cool to have Ben Platt sing that song. And I’m like, okay, but like, I could just listen to the “Dear Evan Hasen” soundtrack, like, I don’t need to watch this show then.

Marines Alvarez 34:37
I get it, I get what you’re saying. I was watching and I was like, I don’t think I’m enjoying it. I was kind of like, dreading having to watch it because I don’t do well with homework assignments. So I put it on and I was like, I don’t know that I’m liking this. And then he sang that song. And I was like, stop it. I love it. Okay, let me down from there, but I enjoyed– I feel like you can’t hire Ben Platt and not put him to sing a couple songs.

Nicole Sweeney 35:03
Right!

Marines Alvarez 35:03
I get why you don’t like it, but it was fine to me.

Nicole Sweeney 35:06
I also don’t want to dissuade you from this dislike, I– you can 100% harbor those feelings and I don’t think that you’re wrong, but I also think that the Ben Platt singing moments were part of the kind of larger absurdity of the show. And in that way, it’s a very your mileage may vary kind of experience, like I think it’s one of those things that either you are going to be struck by how fucking ridiculous it is or you’re just gonna lean into it and be like, yeah, like, this is ridiculous, but Ben Platt is singing to me, so I don’t care, wwhich it was 100% the experience that I had,

Democracy Diva 35:48
I appreciate you making space for me to feel my feelings. But I think you’re right about the fantastical notion of that. Like if you’re going to get behind the archer action in the costuming like you should also be able to get behind that. I think I could have if it weren’t for the Assassins plotline. I think one song in the pilot and one song in the finale, I could have been like, yeah, you have been flat. Let’s have them sing two songs like you can figure out a way in which it works in in those scenarios. But like one episode in which he’s in an entire musical, just so that we can have assassinations and it be clever because we’re singing about assassinations like that, that I I couldn’t do–

Nicole Sweeney 36:34
Zoey Deutch wanted a song too, Sam!

Marines Alvarez 36:39
So I’m kind of curious because there are a lot of–there were a lot of like ridiculous things in this. So maybe your moment was Ben Platt singing, but maybe it’s something else

Democracy Diva 36:52
No, no that was not the most ridiculous.

Marines Alvarez 36:53
Okay, was there one moment that was so ridiculous that you like couldn’t buy into it at all, or a plot line or something like that

Democracy Diva 37:00
Aside from Alice’s hair, which is truly the least believable thing on this show. I don’t care how long this 17 year old has been planning on being first lady. You You cannot give her like Hillary Clinton circa 1999 hair and expect me to believe it. Okay, no teenager in 2019 has hair like that. I am still furious about it and I always will be. Moving on, no, I think I’m gonna have to go with the two different poisonings in the same episode as as where, where it really jumped the shark for me.

Marines Alvarez 37:30
I think the entire character of Ricardo.

Nicole Sweeney 37:34
Yes.

Marines Alvarez 37:34
I just–

Democracy Diva 37:35
Agreed.

Marines Alvarez 37:35
What… what? like who is this person and in a show of truly ridiculous things. And the Munchausen by proxy, like entire storyline is very out there and I’m not sure how I feel about it. But then you add Ricardo as a character in there, and of all of the things that like flip flopped in in the whole show. Like he kept flip flopping back and forth in his actions in just a way that felt like it was serving the plot and nothing else. And no other motivations of this admittedly simplistic character. But he– I don’t knowthat was just so, so wild to me. And every time he was on the screen, I just was like, please go away.

Nicole Sweeney 38:19
Yeah, I plus one to that. I was willing to sort of go with most of the show’s absurdities, even as I was like, this is this is going to be very polarizing. I will not be surprised if people don’t like the show. But his scenes were the moments where I did not want to be watching it. It was like, those are the parts where I couldn’t just like go along for the ride and like have fun with it. I was just like, I was distressed by it. I think the the Munchausen by proxy storyline only works and like air quotes on works, eh. The degree to which it works, let’s just say instead rests solely on it being fun to watch Jessica Lange and Zoe Deutsch. Like that’s– They are both very talented. And that is definitely one of those things that in retrospect, it’s like, I don’t like this. Why is any of this there, but I never had any complaints while I was watching it because both of those actresses are so lovely. Until we cut to Ricardo scenes where I was just like I– Why? Why? Why?

Marines Alvarez 39:28
The whole like infinity thing, I wasn’t sure where they were going. I thought she was in on it for a little while because of the way that it felt to me that she was very purposefully acting in some way.

Democracy Diva 39:38
I think it would’ve been more interesting if she was.

Nicole Sweeney 39:41
Yes.

Marines Alvarez 39:41
I like, I don’t understand what they were trying to do with her character. Because with all of these, like 27 year olds playing high schoolers, and then they were playing her even younger, or like more naive. And that could have been like a thing where it was like a you know, there was some moments where her grandma was basically saying that she was like stupid or whatnot. But it could have been like a product of the whole Munchausen by proxy thing like because of how she was raised. But again, none of that is ever addressed. She’s just constantly acting like five years younger than she is and I don’t know why.

Democracy Diva 40:16
And dressing like she’s four. It so strange.

Marines Alvarez 40:19
I have one other like complaint. I know, this is like super negative. I wish I had something good to say. But it’s about some of the like, I guess humor that didn’t land for me. And in all of like the explorations– that’s a strong word.. In all of the plots that it was like throwing at us, the the like, they’re rich, and privileged and we’re going to sometimes make jokes about that, like humor didn’t always land, especially when it came to Astrid and like she slumped it in New York for a couple days and then she came back with all of these feelings about being poor or whatnot. And I don’t know that that humor to me was just kind of like it was it felt a little flat. It didn’t land specifically. And there wasn’t I don’t know, at the end of the day, it’s still a story about like a team of people trying to get a rich white man into office. Right. And it even had like a few lines. I guess it was the brothers that were like, you know, Gwyneth Paltrow says that, like the world is getting over entitled white men and their response is like, no, they’re not. That’s why we’re entitled kind of thing. So it like knew that it was in there, but I don’t know. It just again, never looked at it quite in the eye long enough. And in the ways that it was trying to be humorous about it, I just didn’t find it funny.

Democracy Diva 41:39
We didn’t need Payton’s brothers in the show at all. We certainly didn’t need them attempting to murder their own father. And we definitely didn’t need the father just like totally deciding to forgive them for that because again, you don’t see the motivations of any of this, which is bananas. In terms of getting back to anything I liked about this, as soon as I saw Judith Light in the finale, I was like, oh, what show are we watching now? Because this is the show I want to watch. Judith light is amazing. And I believe that she is responsible for one of the most complex portrayals of Jewish motherhood in television history on Transparent and that is very important to me. And then, and then Bette Midler coming on as her as as her number two. I mean, I like I was just in heaven for all of that. All I wanted was more of that. And those actually felt like people I’ve seen both in politics and in musical theater. Like these people actually felt, even though they were still over the top exaggerations and fantastical like, they had a grounding in reality that I understood that I didn’t see in basically the rest of the season. So I think that is how even though I really hated this season, I really did land in a place where like, yeah, I want to watch season two, because it’s Bette Midler and Judith Light taking on this, like, you know, taking on Ben Platt singing songs from Assassin’s like, which again, I can hate and love at the same time, I am convinced of this. I am excited for where the show is going to go next, because I think a lot of my problems with this season is that none of them made sense in the context of a high school student council election. And granted, that was the point, but that didn’t really make that any less of a problem. And so getting to see you know, we had to pretend all of the stakes were high enough that there would be like 10 different attempted murders over the– over the course of this campaign. And now that we have an actual campaign and like a really interesting generational dynamic of like these two, you know, older women at the top of their game going against this like young upstart, but like, he’s also a white billionaire man. And like, they’ve been doing politics since like, you know, they were women in the 70s trying to get in the door. Like there are lots of interesting things to be played with there and, and stories that I’m interested by. However, if this is just going to be like, how many different people on Ben’s team can murder or sleep with How many different people on Judith Light’s team than like, I’m a little bit less interested in that.

Nicole Sweeney 44:05
I do want to quickly shout out the intro to this. I, I loved it. I was delighted by it. I also, I don’t know and I don’t know if this is purely like the intro just being good or like you know me as somebody who you know works in video, but the– I was entranced by the water effects. Like every time I could not could not avert my eyes as the wood turns to like actual Ben Platt. But just all the little trinkets inside this wooden shell of a character. I don’t know I loved the intro. I never skipped at once. So shout out to the intro.

Democracy Diva 44:44
I thought the intro was visually incredible. Actually made me think a lot of “Game of Thrones” just in like how high the bar has been set for opening credits that you need to be really creative about them now and I really like that. I kind of wish the story was more about someone who was wouldn’t on the outside and complex on the inside.

Nicole Sweeney 45:03
I don’t think that that’s– I don’t know that that that intro reads to me is wouldn’t on the outside complex on the inside, it reads as less like, here’s the sum of his parts. They’re very specific. He’s this and this and this and like hollow.

Democracy Diva 45:19
Okay, I am persuaded by that. I didn’t watch it nearly as many times as you.

Nicole Sweeney 45:26
had a lot of time to think about it, Sam!

Democracy Diva 45:28
This is one where I actually will be will be as persuaded. I like that reading of it. Listen, if I can convince you to to slowly start to hate everything I can talk about, I should at least let you convince me to like one part of something.

Marines Alvarez 45:43
And on that note, thank you so much to Sam for joining us this week and thank you all for listening. We’d love to hear all of your thoughts good and bad on “The Politician.” There will be a post dedicated to this episode up on snark squad. com. You can also join our community on patreon at patreon.com slash snark squad. If you’re enjoying this podcast we’d also appreciate it if you could share with your friends and rate and review us on Apple Podcast or Stitcher. You can find all of us on Twitter at snark underscore squad. You can find me at my name is Marines.

Nicole Sweeney 46:19
I am at Sweeney says.

Democracy Diva 46:21
And you can find me at democracy diva.

Marines Alvarez 46:23
Thank you as always to Stefan Chin for the theme music that is playing us out right now. We will be back in your feed next week. Bye!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai