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Political Animals 1.05.
In which Grandma is the best again, and Blair Brown is subjected to a horrible wig.
One of the reasons why I like Political Animals is that it keeps showing us the characters in different combinations instead of just sticking to one set of interactions. So this week we get Grandma Barrish and Ann, bonding over cleaning out TJ’s drug stash and deciding to smoke pot together, which was in turns hilarious and touching (though I have to say, Annie, you are the one who keeps bringing up Doug’s mother when the two of you are intimate, so don’t blame only Elaine for that kind of situation), Susan and her mother in flashback (horrid wig, poor Blair, the 90s weren’t that cruel to everyone!), Bud and T.J., Elaine and Garcetti working so efficiently together that now I wonder whether instead of her resigning to campaign against him or him resigning (unlikely, he’s not in LBJs position), he’ll offer her the VP position instead. Which would also give a point to the Vice President being used as the closest thing the show has to a villain throughout.
It was Susan’s turn to get flashbacks this episode, while in present day she first sparred and then got drunk with Doug and then the show went where I half suspected it might after the last episode. I’m not sure where the show is going with this, though. I mean, yes, on one level it’s an obvious way to confront Susan and Douglas, the two characters most judgmental on both Bud Hammond’s cheating and Elaine’s first standing by him and then after separation re-establishing ties and having a one night stand respectively, with their own capacity for cheating. But on the other, theirs is the problem – which is getting larger – of the audience asked to buy Susan as a great journalist when so far the show fails to deliver. [Bad username or unknown identity: ”Abigail_n”] last week pointed out that she made herself part of the story already, which is a breach of journalistic ethics, and by having sex with Douglas, the whole cheating aspect aside, she destroyed once and for all any pretense she could report on the Hammonds objectively. Moreover, by agreeing to Elaine’s bargain (the “press release” story about T.J. and allergies against an exclusive on the Chinese situation), she also contributed to the falsification of truth. Now I’m not saying any of this is unrealistic (err, as far as actions in an entertaining political soap go in general) and given how obsessed Susan is with Elaine in particular and the Hammonds in general, it was to be expected she’d end up in bed with one of them sooner or later (and I’m glad it wasn’t Bud). But what it results in is making Susan look like a warning story about embedded journalism, bad pun now intended, perhaps a la Bob Woodward (since Mr. Watergate – well, one of the two – went on to write fawning books about Bush in return for a seat at the table until he grew too disenchanted with Dubya to continue), except as opposed to Bob W., she doesn’t have any great past deed in her resumé, either. Her columns on the Hammonds were opinion pieces, not investigative journalism. So basically the most capable female journalist on the show so far if we go by show instead of tell has been Georgia, who sees the Hammonds as news but isn’t obsessed with them and came up with results without bargaining with Elaine or Doug for them. And I doubt that was the narrative intention.
One of the reasons why I like Political Animals is that it keeps showing us the characters in different combinations instead of just sticking to one set of interactions. So this week we get Grandma Barrish and Ann, bonding over cleaning out TJ’s drug stash and deciding to smoke pot together, which was in turns hilarious and touching (though I have to say, Annie, you are the one who keeps bringing up Doug’s mother when the two of you are intimate, so don’t blame only Elaine for that kind of situation), Susan and her mother in flashback (horrid wig, poor Blair, the 90s weren’t that cruel to everyone!), Bud and T.J., Elaine and Garcetti working so efficiently together that now I wonder whether instead of her resigning to campaign against him or him resigning (unlikely, he’s not in LBJs position), he’ll offer her the VP position instead. Which would also give a point to the Vice President being used as the closest thing the show has to a villain throughout.
It was Susan’s turn to get flashbacks this episode, while in present day she first sparred and then got drunk with Doug and then the show went where I half suspected it might after the last episode. I’m not sure where the show is going with this, though. I mean, yes, on one level it’s an obvious way to confront Susan and Douglas, the two characters most judgmental on both Bud Hammond’s cheating and Elaine’s first standing by him and then after separation re-establishing ties and having a one night stand respectively, with their own capacity for cheating. But on the other, theirs is the problem – which is getting larger – of the audience asked to buy Susan as a great journalist when so far the show fails to deliver. [Bad username or unknown identity: ”Abigail_n”] last week pointed out that she made herself part of the story already, which is a breach of journalistic ethics, and by having sex with Douglas, the whole cheating aspect aside, she destroyed once and for all any pretense she could report on the Hammonds objectively. Moreover, by agreeing to Elaine’s bargain (the “press release” story about T.J. and allergies against an exclusive on the Chinese situation), she also contributed to the falsification of truth. Now I’m not saying any of this is unrealistic (err, as far as actions in an entertaining political soap go in general) and given how obsessed Susan is with Elaine in particular and the Hammonds in general, it was to be expected she’d end up in bed with one of them sooner or later (and I’m glad it wasn’t Bud). But what it results in is making Susan look like a warning story about embedded journalism, bad pun now intended, perhaps a la Bob Woodward (since Mr. Watergate – well, one of the two – went on to write fawning books about Bush in return for a seat at the table until he grew too disenchanted with Dubya to continue), except as opposed to Bob W., she doesn’t have any great past deed in her resumé, either. Her columns on the Hammonds were opinion pieces, not investigative journalism. So basically the most capable female journalist on the show so far if we go by show instead of tell has been Georgia, who sees the Hammonds as news but isn’t obsessed with them and came up with results without bargaining with Elaine or Doug for them. And I doubt that was the narrative intention.