The Politician is a comedy-drama about a high school student (who looks about 30) who spends his entire life meticulously planning his goal of becoming president that lurches from rapid-fire banter to sledgehammer sincerity without warning and feels so mannered and inhuman that you suspect that its own opening titles (where the lead character is carved from wood) were made as a sly piece of self-parody. Plus his best friend is a ghost.

What an odd show this is. Even by the standards of Ryan Murphy, whose shows have a tendency to loop off into incomprehensibility in their latter stages; it seems to have a particularly lax sense of self. It revolves around Payton Hobart; a boy who, since the age of seven, has been laser-focused on becoming the president of America. It’s a State of America Today declaration that feels like a particularly expensive daytime soap opera. It’s an exploration of privilege that’s deeply enamoured with its own privilege. It’s a high school story where all the students are played by adults.

There are moments where The Politician will annoy you to the point of madness. Our guess is that this will be as bad as it gets. The overarching idea for The Politician is to span the entirety of Hobart’s life, with each new season focused on a different campaign. The season one finale effectively doubles as a pilot for season two; in it, Hobart is older and less obnoxiously precocious, fighting a battle with higher stakes than a school election, and there’s a new cast that includes Judith Light and Bette Midler. It leagues better than the seven episodes that preceded it so, when it comes back next year, hopefully it’ll come back in better shape. But who knows? The Politician is overworked and distracted. A little more focus would pay off in spades.

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