What I’m Watching: The Politician

The Politician: Season 2, Episode 2 “Conscious Unthroupling” (B+)

There’s a reason the characters on this show speak so quickly – there’s a lot to cover in each episode. I thought I had remembered season one mostly being thirty minutes, but it turns out I was wrong and every episode was roughly between forty minutes and an hour. What’s most interesting is that the focus now is just as much on Dede and her campaign as it is on Payton’s campaign, in which he’s becoming an increasingly less prominent player. I was thrilled that McAfee, played by Ben Platt’s original “Dear Evan Hansen” costar Laura Dreyfuss, got a bigger focus in this episode as she proclaimed her need to have some time away from James and Skye and to have sex with someone. That plan went awry when she ran into both of them at the same Broadway show, and her date David was only so willing to be ignored in favor of their very codependent friendship. Alice also returned in a big way, doing her part by following Astrid and suggesting that she and Payton bring her into a thruple so that they could assure she wouldn’t be able to act against them. They did wait a bit too long to act on Payton’s threat of going public with the gossip about Dede’s thruple, and she made the decision to publicize that on her own. The timing for William to officially leave them to be with Hadassah couldn’t be worse, and now they’ll have to work hard to maintain the illusion of something that was supposed to be secret in the first place. Tino is keeping all his options open, and I suspect that he’ll ditch both Dede and Georgina after leading them on for quite a while, that or he’ll face one of them in the presidential race instead.