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Critic Reviews
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Although the relentless superficiality of the characters gets tiring, it allows you to keep laughing as they double cross and second guess each other at a turbocharged pace. There’s fun to be had at the expense of the premise of the school as a microcosm of American society.
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It’s another dazzling Murphy triumph. It has his trademark hurricane of a narrative that sweeps you up and deposits you breathless and agape somewhere else entirely an hour later. He has garnered a set of blistering performances from his actors.
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Ben Platt (Broadway’s “Dear Evan Hansen”) goes all Tracy Flick in this comedy. ... This is one of the year’s best.
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A rollicking meditation on fakes, frauds, and phonies, where anything from a spouse to a case of cancer can turn out to be counterfeit—and probably will.
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The Politician provides plenty of laughs and on-target jabs at our current political moment — but it’s the battered yet still-beating heart found in Platt’s performance that ultimately has us pulling the lever for this one.
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Even when The Politician is flailing all over the place, its heart is tapped into the pain of living in a world full of rich white people and forcing down everything that makes you a little bit different. Like Murphy’s best shows, The Politician is about how sad being happy can be.
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“The Politician” hits a tone—furiously angry, wistful beneath its bitterness—that is indebted to the disillusionment of the Nixon era, and updated to capture the disorientation of ours. The show doesn’t quite do subtlety, or subtext, but nor do these times.
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Following Payton’s own journey of self-discovery, by the end of the season, “The Politician” becomes far more nuanced and complex than its initial few episodes suggest.
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The sharp dialogue and great casting help "Politician," but its success rests mostly on the shoulders of Platt, who carries a big role admirably. ... "Politician" suffers whenever it wanders from Payton. ... But despite its occasional flaws, "Politician" is a relief to watch, because it manages to make fiction stranger than life once more. That is no small achievement in 2019.
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Murphy productions are never boring, and this one bursts with frothy twists and amusing set pieces. ... Yet it’s Payton who makes the show more than just fun.
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It’s tonally all over the place. Respective elements of it are intriguing and occasionally fantastic. Platt is a captivating actor. ... Imperfect as it is, every decision, from the casting to the camera work to the tone and the themes merit dissection. ... Is a series’ mere ambition and the promise of an interesting season two enough to merit endorsement? In the case of The Politician, we’re surprising even ourselves by voting yes.
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While The Politician's loopy turns can sometimes make it feel like the marriage of a live-action cartoon and a Wes Anderson movie, it's never dull and always comes back to the same question: What do you have to be made of to be president today?
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The Politician suffers from a combination of Netflix bloat and Murphy’s own tendency to overreach for the hell of it. ... With all of this said, it is absolutely maddening to report that the finale sets up a season 2 that looks utterly fantastic.
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The Politician has no interest in acknowledging the real-world whatsoever. Each character is just a character on TV; they never feel like someone you could actually meet in real life, and that’s good enough, I guess.
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The Politician balances well-honed satire and melodramatic frenzy, succeeding in its aim to engender both a critical appraisal of real-world politics and grotesque car-crash voyeurism. Both of the show’s competing sensibilities flow from Platt’s captivating performance, and one’s enjoyment of the series will largely depend on one’s take on Payton.
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Platt is mostly excellent, but he's not a comic actor, which is fine because "The Politician" is not exactly a comedy either. Never one to be bound by labels or genres anyway, Murphy has created a dramedy, satire, tragedy, romance, coming-of-age story and political parody, all of which contribute to viewer whiplash if not exactly ennui.
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Farcical, snarky, admittedly creative but at times irritating and off-putting series.
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“The Politician” is sometimes a fun watch, but tonally it’s all over the place. The premiere offers some genuine emotions while episode two leans much harder into dark comedy.
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Someday “The Politician” could someday evolve into a meaningful, potent statement about the hazards and rewards about ambition and leadership, particular as those ideas are viewed by would-be officials and the electorate. Right now, however, it says a lot more about Murphy’s ambition than anyone else’s, real or fictional.
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Payton’s story as a wealthy white teenager empowered by his own self-delusion is too familiar a tale to be so lightly drawn.
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With these juicy themes in play, the first season of “The Politician” is nonetheless a mixed bag. ... And yet it’s highly watchable.
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“The Politician” seems to grow quickly bored with itself, shifting tones and adding so many twists it starts to feel like improv. It asks you to take its characters seriously while pitching them into caricature. The plot moves constantly, but it doesn’t really advance. ... The series has enough wit and visual style, though, that it’s a pleasure to watch in the moment — just as long as you don’t think beyond the moment.
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“The Politician” is never boring, but it never quite reaches the level you hope it would after that premiere. It struggles from a common Murphy problem in a lack of focus, but, much more surprisingly, often feels a bit toothless.
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Somehow, it’s all in here, a mash-up of deadpan vibes and manic melodrama made brighter and prettier: all the best parts, underlined to death. The result is both irritating and fun, a feeling that has become something of a Murphy hallmark. Which also means that “The Politician” is exceedingly watchable. ... As the story plods on, “The Politician’s” atmospherics do wear thin.
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With a wandering focus and an erratic sense of tone, The Politician simply doesn't come together as a clean vision. It remains generally watchable throughout thanks to a great cast and fleeting moments of inspiration and it actually teases a promising second season.
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Even as the majority of the first season can feel frustratingly rough, the finale does succeed in setting up a properly outrageous second season.
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Marking Ryan Murphy's first series for Netflix, The Politician feels like a mashup of the producer's high-school-set dramas -- a dollop of "Scream Queens," a dash of "Glee," and a whole lot of the Alexander Payne-directed movie "Election." Throw in some high-profile casting, and it's a shiny but not especially bright bauble that falls short of a winning ticket.
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It’s so aggressively kitschy and cutesy that, on the rare occasions when it calms down and tries to be earnest and affecting, the sincerity comes across as calculated, like a politician tearing up while delivering the same campaign speech for the fourth time in a week. Considering the show’s many irritating and exhausting qualities, it’s a small miracle that The Politician hangs together, much less that it manages to produce some touching and insightful moments.
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On this middling first series, it’s unclear how much more we want to see Hobart and co. Unlike its confident anti-hero, The Politician hasn’t decided what it wants to be.
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A baroquely yet dully overstuffed series that hides what makes it genuinely new for Murphy—the focus on a single character—in a familiar-for-him form: a histrionic teen melodrama.
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On occasion, Platt or one of his co-stars gets to sing, and for those few precious minutes, Payton will seem tantalizingly real, in a manner suggesting The Politician would have been better off as a full-on musical, where the format forgave some of the artificiality. But those bursts of genuineness are few and far between in this version. ... A show that indulges their [Murphy, Falchuk, and Brennan's] worst impulses.
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I see a lot of half-baked ideas about politics as a means of change, about the harmful dividing lines of class and privilege that separate potential allies, about the importance of the caring and keeping of your mental health, and so much more. But at every turn, The Politician chooses an artificial, inauthentic way of expressing these ideas, of prioritizing the drama for the truth, and opting in for skating by with little else to offer but something superficially indulgent to lose yourself in for a while.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 25 out of 40
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Mixed: 7 out of 40
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Negative: 8 out of 40
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Jun 24, 2020
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Mar 21, 2020
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Nov 18, 2019