The Politician

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.

Ben Platt (Broadway’s “Dear Evan Hansen”) goes all Tracy Flick in this comedy. ... This is one of the year’s best.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Farcical, snarky, admittedly creative but at times irritating and off-putting series.