CBS's Madam Secretary is more than just a 'Hillary Clinton' show
Téa Leoni stars as a tough secretary of state in this new drama, but the intrigue needs to pick up or the audience should move on
What’s the name of the show? Madam Secretary
When does it premiere? Sunday, 21 September, at 8.30pm ET on CBS. But don’t really hold them to that because football is on before it, and any fan of The Good Wife or The Mentalist will tell you that football always runs long and the show doesn’t really start until 845. If you want to watch this show every week, you better just record the whole damn night, because you never know. Stupid damn football is always messing up our shows!
What is this show? When the secretary of state’s plane disappears, a former CIA analyst and friend of the president is called out of semi-retirement to take the post. The staff hates her, the West Wing is skeptical, and her children are bratty high school kids who hate DC life. Oh, and something is fishy with the last top diplomat’s disappearance.
So, this is basically The Hillary Clinton Show? While it’s easy to think that it would be based on her life considering the number of pantsuits worn in the pilot, there aren’t many similarities between Elizabeth McCord (Téa Leoni) and Hilary Clinton. Her husband (Tim Daly) is a demure theology professor instead of a philandering ex-president. Part of the reason Elizabeth gets the job is because she is not a career politician with any aspirations of achieving a higher office. She is not nearly as hawkish as Clinton. And she has much better hair.
So it’s about Madeline Albright? There aren’t nearly enough brooches.
What’s the show’s pedigree? It is executive-produced by Morgan Freeman, a man who has played both the president and God, so he probably knows exactly what he is doing.
What happens in the premiere? Elizabeth is literally shoveling shit on her horse farm in Virginia when the presidential motorcade pulls up and tells her that she is going to be the new secretary of state.
It’s like a white, upper-middle-class version of Cinderella.
When two American college kids are going to be executed in Syria she butts heads with the president’s shady chief of staff (Željko Ivanek) over how to extract them. She also has a state dinner with polygamist head of Swaziland to plan. Oh, and an old CIA friend of hers tells her that the last secretary of state was killed because of something he found out about our relationships in South America. And the call came from inside the (White) House.
Is this show any good? The problem with Madam Secretary is that it is inevitably going to be compared to both The West Wing and The Good Wife, two of the best network shows of the last decade. It is not as good as either of those, at least just yet.
The show that it’s really closest to is the short-lived Geena Davis vehicle Commander in Chief where a female president has to balance her political and family life. The problem with Madam Secretary is that Téa Leoni, as the lynchpin of the show, doesn’t exhibit the likeability of Davis or the vulnerability of Julianna Margulies on The Good Wife. She’s a smart, strong woman, but with Leoni’s delivery she comes across as a little bit bland and holier-than-thou. When she tries to be tough she is less of a fierce badass and more of a threatening bully. These aren’t very good qualities in a person we’re asked to spend 22 hours with over the course of the year rooting for.
While this is a pretty major flaw, it’s really one of the few that the show has. The political action – and I assume there will be a different international incident to diffuse every week – is spelled out so that even those who haven’t picked up a New York Times since the Reagan administration can understand it, but isn’t so exposition heavy that it will turn off news junkies. What’s going to make or break this show is how the intrigue around the disappearance of the old secretary of state is handled. There needs to be a bit more intrigue and danger than we see in the pilot and the relationships between Elizabeth’s staff members needs to be fleshed out a lot more. The impetus in the pilot is, naturally, on Elizabeth, but for the show to have a long life, the audience is going to need some heroes and villains among the staff to keep things interesting.
The weakest part, so far, is what is going on with Elizabeth at home. Other than a chat about foreign policy with her husband in bed (and Daly continues to be as appealing as he is handsome), Elizabeth’s personal life is more distracting than it is illuminating. But yes, I would say this show is good. It’s not great, but if it can ratchet up the drama about three notches, and I think it can, we will be in for a good time.
Which characters will you love? Elizabeth’s bitchy assistant Blake (Erich Bergen) gets all the laughs in the pilot and Elizabeth’s bitchy chief of staff Nadine doesn’t get much to do but as played by the amazing Bebe Neuwirth she is sure to be fantastic. What can I say, I like a bitch.
Which characters will you hate? The president’s chief of staff Russell Jackson is definitely going to be the villain we’re supposed to hate and Ivanek plays menace so well that we’re already hating him so good. As for the character you’ll really hate, it’s Elizabeth’s “anarchist” son Jason (Evan Roe).
What’s the best thing about it? That it’s not a Hillary Clinton roman à clef.
What’s the worst thing about it? The president tells Elizabeth, “You don’t just think outside of the box, you don’t even know that the box exists.” A writer should be shot for that.
Is it worth watching? Yes. But if Leoni doesn’t start to inhabit her role and the intrigue in her office doesn’t pick up, then it’s time to devote your Sunday night to something else – just not football.
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