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The First Lady, a ten-episode miniseries on Showtime, desperately wants to convince you that it is a chamber piece. Scarcely does the camera go wide; it observes the East Wing of the White House in medium closeup, shrinking the domain of the Presidents spouse down to a miserable tableau of dour furniture and even more dour facial expressions. This is a straightforward dramatic metaphordomestic interior as psychological interiorand it might have been effective if the script demonstrated an interest in its protagonists inner lives. But it does not. The show wont let Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford, and Michelle Obama, who are played by Gillian Anderson, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Viola Davis, respectively, be anything but handsomely wounded victors.

The miniseries, cooked up by Aaron Cooley, a first-time creator, and showrun by Cathy Schulman, with all ten episodes directed by Susanne Bier, is an odd failure. It has a halting structure and a maudlin view of history that make the show feel dated. Early on, it dawns on you that the project is very anti-Ryan Murphy. When middle-aged Hollywood goddesses are gathered, our minds are thrust to that auteurs precinct, where, for better or for worse, the mature performer is the rebel muse and historical incident is a putty plaything. In contrast, Cooleys cast has been sealed in an enclosure, given no freedom to roam beyond the barrier of impersonation. Style, too, has been banished. The First Lady refuses any hint of irony, satire, glamour, or scandal. I, too, can tire of the showy po-mo aesthetics of historical fictions these days, but that doesnt mean the answer is to abdicate the insertion of perspective.

If The First Lady does have a perspective, its a mannered one, a fait accompli: the idea that Americans have an insatiable fascination with the paradox of the First Spouse, she who is proximate to power though officially endowed with none. As Eleanor Roosevelt, dismayed to have not been given an official position in her husbands Cabinet, laments, the First Lady position is not a job but, rather, her circumstance. The show makes First Ladydom both generic and somehow cosmic, a kind of condition passed on from Administration to Administration, a mark placed on fifty-three Eves.

The creators have chosen their three subjects carefully; a feminist gloss sticks on them. The nature of these First Ladies does not mesh with the expectations of the role. Eleanor is the visionary, in the closet in more ways than one; initially, she can evince her genius as a diplomat only through ventriloquism, feeding her husband his best lines. Betty is exhausted with the fakery of political life; an iconoclast, and the last Republican wife before the onslaught of the Reaganite far right, she thumbs through The Feminine Mystique and dances uninhibitedly to Harry Nilsson. Michelle, as we know well, has a disdain for the equivocation necessary to keep the political engine going. Shes also, as the First Black First Lady, the unspoken justification for the series: the ne plus ultra of its gurgling optimism. Virtually every shred of dialogue is aphoristic. First Ladies and their teams are often the vanguards of social progress in this country, Betty writes in a letter to Michelle, at the beginning of the Obama Administration. That argument is specious at best, though theres nothing wrong with the show allowing a fictionalized Betty to impart her belief. The problem is that The First Lady doesnt dare to stray from her viewpoint.

In its attempt to tell three histories, the show scrambles the chronologies of its subjects White House tenures as well as their larger biographies. There are flashbacks nested in flashbacks; a second suite of actors play the women and their husbands when they were young. Two time lines, which span more than a century of activity, are tenuously anchored by theme. The writers have fabricated resonances, but these only elide the specificity of each womans life. It serves none of these figures, and certainly not the viewer, to insinuate equivalence between a young orphaned Eleanor (Eliza Scanlen), sent to boarding school in Britain; a young Michelle (Jayme Lawson), facing institutional racism on the South Side of Chicago; and a young Betty (Kristine Froseth), a dancer who trained under Martha Graham, and whose dreams of stardom were thwarted by a bad first marriage and by alcoholism.

On occasion, The First Lady offers insights into the eccentricity of political marriage. Thats not to say that any of the Presidents are well written or capably performed. Kiefer Sutherland, Aaron Eckhart, and O-T Fagbenleas FranklinD. Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, and Barack Obama, respectivelystruggle to give life to waxen cartoons of ironic emasculation. Still, scenes of compromise stand out amid the two-dimensionality. Andersons pursed mouth (even tighter than the mouth she uses for Margaret Thatcher, on The Crown) breaks when her character discovers correspondence between her husband and his longtime mistress; it breaks, too, in the company of Eleanors own lover, the reporter Lorena Hickok (Lily Rabe). The Roosevelts marriage is a dtente, an alliance between political operators. Pfeiffer and Eckhart, meanwhile, give the Fords a sexual chemistry that feels daring; when Gerald pardons Richard Nixon, his decision disturbs the couples emotional universe. Davis and Fagbenle, as the Obamas, are the least successful pairing. Their relationship is filtered only through racial insecurity, with Michelle as the real-talk bully to Baracks dreamer. Playing Michelle is clearly a burden for Davis. How do you summon a living titan, a figure who already plays herself so well? The actor ultimately relies on mimicry, and makeupa parody of two-thousands corporate glam, with the thin eyebrows and the glossed lips. The First Lady is not ready to puncture the hip grandiosity of the Obamas, instead leaving the couple hazy and ill-defined. Its an offensive navet, considering how artfully the Obamas have crafted their modern legend.

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Throughout the show, extraordinary eventsPearl Harbor, Watergate, the Sandy Hook shootingare rendered as catalysts for personal growth. Anna, what happened? Eleanor asks her daughter, after rushing into the West Wing. The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor, Anna responds. How bad? Very bad. But, on the other hand, the tragedy gave Eleanor an opportunity to address the frightened populace, so, as the series seems to imply, not all bad? After a few minutes of this, we are jolted to another lady, another dilemma. Encouraging her husband to stand up to his white liberal base, Michelle Obama speechifies, Weve been called nigga in every way possible. For once, lets be the niggas. The rushed tempo has a way of caricaturing what is meant to be serious.

Sometimes you ought to allow a bad-wig costume drama to be a bad-wig costume drama. The triumphalist vibe of The First Lady penetrates every element of its world, down to the major-chord score. This sort of big-name vehicle, reeking of Hollywood hubris, can sometimes take on cult-classic status owing to its concentration of bad performances from great actorsor, as in the case of The First Lady, its one good performance amid a sea of middling ones. If such status is conferred on this show, itll be because of Michelle Pfeiffer. Anderson and Davis are regulars on the grandstanding-bio-pic circuit, so they have a bag of tricks to pull from when giving flesh to myths. Pfeiffer is acting in a different milieu altogether. When she speaks the wretched dialogue, she tempers the awkwardness, adding a sigh, a pause. Her Betty Ford is a study of the womans fears and attractions, a suggestive riff on themes of addiction, frustrated freedom, and wifely melancholy. When Bettys compulsions spin out of control, and her family stages an intervention, Pfeiffer nudges the script away from the written psycho-biddy mania, deciding to show us, instead, controlled rage. Its real.

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The First Lady Is a Bad-Wig Costume Drama - The New Yorker