Political Animals and Veep

[meddow]

I've been watching Political Animals, which is just pure, glorious wish fulfilment television. The plot is that an intelligent, moral and ambitious former First Lady, played by Sigourney Weaver, divorces her cheating ex-President husband after she loses the Democratic Primary, becomes Secretary of State and then sick of the current administration

Comments

[sophia_gratia]

I have a lot of love for Political Animals, no matter how hamfisted and melodramatic it gets. 'The Woman Problem' really stole my heart, and not just because Vanessa Redgrave can do anything. How many different complicated relationships between women were at play in that episode? And I loved that the boys were off having emotional hissyfits in some house, while the girls were getting shit done in Washington. Way to flip the script, show. I'll put up with a lot of nonsense for TV that is interested in ambitious women as ambitious women, and not in order to mock or vilify them.

And I've been cautiously curious about Veep, though I'd heard some things that made me wary - like that Julia Louis Dreyfus' character is set up to be mocked; that it's about a woman in power who's bad at her job in a way that's easily construed as misogynist. No?

[meddow]

That's the point where I really started loving the show despite its flaws as well. I'm so starved for shows about ambitious women, who have complex relationships with other women, even with it's problems, this show is amazing to me

[airie_fairy]

I think it might be because I come from a position of having lived through US politics, but the "run against the incumbent of your own party" thing is SUCH A BAD IDEA to me. Like, patently absurd. I don't even mean because of vote splitting. But because of how, simple-politically speaking, it's basically saying "my party sucks...vote for my party?" so what seems more likely to happen is all the people who share your lack of faith in the incumbent are probably going to be MORE encouraged to vote for the rival party, because even you're saying they have no reason to have faith in what you stand for. That and my god, the probable nightmares of trying to get funding. Luckily, she seems to have plenty of her own money

[meddow]

I've been wearing my West Wing cynicism and realism blinders when watching the show and largely been ignoring the stuff that could never, ever, ever happen in favour of just enjoying future President Ripley and her awesomeness. Although, admittedly, its the international political storylines that I find more absurd than the domestic political story lines

[airie_fairy]

Well, ideally, running against an incumbent of your own party would be a statement of "I'm a better representative of what this party should stand for than you've proven to be," and that works when people are running for Congress. But when there's an incumbent president, their party stands behind them. They just do. Like I said, thinking in party-line simplistic terms, as so many people do. It looks really bad for the party if they're saying the dude running the country the past several years is that hopeless that he's being disowned, and doing so will backfire on the person saying it. If there's no incumbent in a presidential race (say, someone's had their two terms and is now ineligible and we're starting from scratch), then you get the free-for-all of multiple candidates from both major parties.