The First Lady premieres on Showtime on April 17, 2022.
The premiere of Showtime’s anthology series The First Lady opens with Amy Sherald (Tiffany Hobbs) working on her portrait of Michelle Obama (Viola Davis). The artist explains that she declined to paint the president but chose to paint Michelle because “I don’t want to just paint the official. I am interested in the real.” Unfortunately, the show’s writers and director Susanne Bier failed to bring any of Sherald’s daring or creativity to their show. Instead, they’ve created the television equivalent of stiff, formal photos that are so concerned with verisimilitude that they leave their extraordinary subjects feeling lifeless.
The premiere of the 10-episode season slips forwards and backwards in time to share moments in the life of Obama, Eleanor Roosevelt (Gillian Anderson), and Betty Ford (Michelle Pfeiffer), mostly focusing on how the women adjust as their husbands face new adversity and rise to greater prominence. Yet the emotional impact is perpetually blunted by a script that feels like a school presentation rather than compelling drama.
There’s the obligatory scene of Franklin D. Roosevelt (Kiefer Sutherland) being stricken by polio that goes into far too much detail about how it’s unusual but not impossible in adults and how a swim in contaminated water cost the rising political star the use of his legs. “If anyone can rise above tragedy it’s Franklin,” Roosevelt’s political advisor Louis Howe (Jackie Earle Haley) reassures Eleanor before the show cuts to a scene of a young version of herself at her mother’s funeral. It’s a blunt demonstration that she, too, can overcome tragedy that also reminds us – not for the last time in the episode – that Teddy Roosevelt was her cousin.
The transitions are similarly obvious when Betty, then second lady, attends the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr.’s mother, Alberta King, after a bit of flat political intrigue with the easy villain of Ford’s new chief-of-staff, Donald Rumsfeld (Derek Cecil). After some splicing in of archival footage of the funeral, the show cuts to a huge file of white supremacist threats against Barack Obama (Julian De Niro) in 2007 that led to him being the earliest candidate to ever receive a protective detail.
The First Lady so far feels like a tremendous waste of the impressive cast assembled. Anderson seems like she’s doing a repeat of her performance of Margaret Thatcher on The Crown with a different accent as she fights to have a real role in her husband’s administration. Davis has Michelle’s mannerisms down but in this first episode is relegated to a symbol of racial progress as she strikes pride into White House elevator operator Wilson Jerman -- who Michelle wrote about in her memoir -- and grimaces at the subservience of a Black man in a painting chosen by outgoing first lady Laura Bush (Kathleen Garrett).
Only Pfeiffer seems to be having any fun in the role, first seen dancing in a pink dressing gown and mixing a cocktail while planning her family’s retirement to Palm Springs, which is of course scuttled by Ford’s appointment as vice president and then president during the fallout of the Watergate scandal. Yet even then it’s a setup for more trivia about Betty’s dance training and her connection to Frank Sinatra.
Pfeiffer also delivers some great physical humor in the press conference where Ford’s vice presidential nomination is announced and she’s forced to share a chair with Pat Nixon, and when she delivers a speech and struggles to find room for her purse and a glass of wine at the podium. Pfeiffer’s the only one who delivers any fire in her performances, whether she’s admitting that she underwent psychiatric treatment in a bid to redirect scrutiny from her husband’s own mental health or laying into him for putting his ambitions above her wishes.
A similar argument between Michelle and Barack is far more subdued, with Barack persuading his wife by citing how a Black grandmother thanked him for being a true inspiration to her grandchildren. It’s the sort of story cited in stump speeches and well-edited memoirs and feels disingenuous for a private conversation. There’s an inherent conflict in telling the stories of the extremely famous, especially when they’re still alive to question their portrayal, and the writers of The First Lady appear to have decided to compensate with a bland formality that makes for very dull television.
“This is what we signed up for, ladies, when we married politicians,” Betty tells an audience of congressional wives after spending some time discussing the burdens of supporting a husband who is often too busy to properly return the favor. She goes on to explain how therapy helped her find that “there is a Betty without Gerry Ford.” The premiere of The First Lady provides a glimpse of who that Betty is, but by sharing time with Eleanor and Michelle and their similar challenges, it seems to focus more on the strange nature of the first lady as an institution rather than the individual women who have held the role.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/Cird8pv
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