The Politician

When the American presidency becomes an incomparable farce, creators of fictional worlds have to bend and twist their tales to avoid the lure of entertainment breaking in the face of hypnogogic reality.

And so new Netflix series The Politician kicks off, fittingly, with the lives of the one percent characters so rich and lost they live like caricatures. And they seemed familiar.

When I was little, I used to play with Barbie dolls. My cousin and I would eat tea biscuits covered in pink icings and sprinkles while Barbie lived a wealthy life. Lots of afternoon teas, and outfit changes. She was beaten, chased, raped and had sex with every other doll on the bus. Occasionally, she murdered Ken, and her fellow Barbie doppelgangers. There were drugs, alcohol, dramatic arguments and weird stilted conversations both profound yet empty, entertaining yet hyper-real. We didn't understand the context of anything we were acting out. Like sponges we soaked up elements of the dramatic, with no true understanding of meaning, but disturbing in retrospect.

Welcome to the wealthy leads of The Politician. They say glib, clever things, like shadows of profound thought. Ludicrous exaggerations in an era where exaggeration is sometimes accurate. Like my Barbies, they enact outrageous plotlines without hesitation because the acts lack engagement. These teens possess only a bare inkling of the oddness as they go through the motions. But by graduation, they, too, look back with a matured awareness of the disturbing nature of the incidents at play. At play itself.

Payton wants to be student body president. That is the seam of gold we chase with him. Each season of this series will follow an election. But the vote they're truly chasing is the viewer's. Onscreen and off, the hope of adoration: simpatico. And therein lies the ugly beauty and the beautiful art that is the structured falsity and fractured genius of these storytellers at play. The Politician is an entertainment sell as clear and deliberately murky as any political campaign in the real world.

Payton's team has evaluated modern politicians to work out a plot, if you will, a strict regime of self that ends with him becoming the American President. Some critics have pointed out the present day situation ruins the premise, but why not view the current presidency as a statistical anomaly? That denial in the script is not a flaw, but a reflection. The great wish of the American people. A hope that seems crass in the face of a crass presidency. In a fictional reality, reality could become less than fiction. True crime, while still in play.

In Payton's world, politics is perception. Even inside the screen, reality remains in flux. To describe the pace as erratic is to misunderstand the intent. The erraticism matches a world off-kilter, where pace and predictability can give way to the unexpected and surreal at any moment. People who live their lives like characters in a drama are watching characters in a drama live their lives. In a modern world no fictional writer could compete with, the imagined must become real. Su-rreal. SO REAL.

The Politicians is very, very clever in an era of sometimes rampant, often veiled anti-intellectualism. Where those who cling to traditional hierarchies of critical thought save their judgment almost exclusively for clever fare, as if threatened by the ideas of others, and betrayed by the powers giving them a platform. A quick search of online reviews shows the compliments are mostly begrudging, like sugar-free sprinkles.

And they, too, become part of the story: the expected statistics. Criticism outside the screen, yet representative of the culture of criticism inside the screen. How we judge defines us. What we judge, defines us. In judging such a program, the clueless become another exaggeration. The premise disarms critiquers of their power. But television that challenges is used to being railed at. A recalcitrant child who keeps misinterpreting the instruction "be good".

The storylines amplify and distort. They steal from the rich(ness of the real world) and give to the poor (onscreen lives). But what they steal was often already stolen. An ouroboros between 3D and 2D living. Television incarnate. A kind of demented Robin Hood reworking through an entertainment filter. Even as the characters grow, they evolve into variations of other caricatures. Carrying their old caricatures inside them. Like costuming that survived a set upgrade.

Everyone is real. Everyone is not. Everyone is aware entertainment is reality. Everyone is aware reality is entertainment. The filters are endless. The kaleidoscope is made of gold, like the toilet rejected by Trump's White House. Like an Instagram account that is live, forever.

The characters try to earn points with wokeness, to be seen as seeing the unseen. But every gesture is a pose in a funhouse of mirrors. A litany of inauthentic reflections more solid than the person found in the center, written to the core. We wander from episode to episode. We run. We watch them follow the patterns of wealth. We watch them follow the patterns of poverty. Everyone is not real. Nobody's pain is of value. Everyone is in pain. The colors are saturated, but neatly contained. We laugh at tragedy, and it's tragic, how we laugh. Nobody can control the humor. We are all here, together, on the Barbie bus. Popular culture, twisting the knife.

Payton wants to be student body president—so he can be an American president. Because the fictional character has found a pattern in the non-fictional, who present as fictional in a non-fictional world. The Politician is like a YouTube channel that opens toys so we can see inside the box. Except the box contains another box, and in a scathing indictment, the toys are crying. Laughing while crying. Payton sings to cry. His tears are in tune. We are all in tune.

We are amused, we are endlessly amused.

By the pain. Bothered by the pain. Both real, and unreal.