The topic of college admissions lends itself well to degenerate farce on The Politician, a terribly giddy examination of human desire, American hierarchies, and the baroque structures erected in support of each. The eight-episode first season of the serieswhich was created by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennanis the first flowering of Murphys three-hundred-million-dollar deal with Netflix, the biggest such contract in TV history. The Politician announces its intention to provoke from the jump, with a trigger warning alerting persons of sensitive mental health that some distress may follow. The plot, a soapy, dystopian fantasia about extracurricular competition among rich high-school students, delivers on the threat: theres suicide, existential alienation, and fear and loathing in both the Friedrich Nietzsche and Hunter S. Thompson-on-the-campaign-trail senses, plus high anxiety about class and power. This is American Horror Story: So-Called Meritocracy, and it arrives at an opportune moment: on the heels of the college-admissions scandal, right around the PSATs.

It is a timely satire not only in its strafing of privilege but also in its funhouse-mirror reflection of the contrived faades and convoluted selves of aspirants to political power. The high-school antihero, Payton Hobart (Ben Platt), is a type-A kid and a DSM-V-type sociopath. Hopeful of securing admission to Harvard College, and thereby moving toward his long-term goal of winning the U.S. Presidency, Payton is running for the presidency of his student body. Payton seems addicted to ambition for its own sake, but he also worries, in his heart of hearts, that he has no heartthats hes faade all the way to his core. Platt is amazingly elastic in depicting Paytons struggle to maintain the series of successful gestures comprising a personality that at times seems focus-grouped. The character is, like most who dream of high office, a narcissist. But is his narcissism malignant?

In flashbacks, we see that Payton, who is perhaps sexually fluid or simply closeted, had a romance with his Mandarin-language tutor, who is now his opponent for the student-body presidency. This is River (David Corenswet), who looks like what you get if you picked up a vintage Abercrombie & Fitch catalog and ordered a J.F.K., Jr., clone. Payton and River were friends and part-time lovers, but it was doomedthe shows outlook on human nature is often deliciously grimfrom the start. (The scene depicting their first meeting offers a symmetrical shot of the pair hovering over a chessboard.) Likewise, the first episode takes extreme care to depict characters troubled by the questions of what is fake and what is real by having them repeat those labels again and again. It also allows a member of Paytons campaign team to exclaim, during a debate, Hes sweating like Nixon! The show had already done a foxy job of evoking the thought, but it cant resist returning to the passage with a highlighter. On the other hand, I guess that it cant hurt to shoutthat it clears a safe path to proper understandingand to be firm about your points when you are trying to make a work of Heathers-level mercilessness in a country that cannot handle a Heathers remake.

Gwyneth Paltrow plays Paytons mom with a benevolent glow; the family also includes a gerbil-like zillionaire father (Bob Balaban) and Paytons two older brothers, a set of toxic jocks with popped collars. Imagine Bill Murrays jackass twins from Rushmore, but played by Armie Hammer. The Politician isnt merely cribbing Wes Anderson, here and elsewhere, with its casting, compositions, camera moves, and stylized prep environment, with fabulous costumes in tangerine and lavender and cotton-candy pink. The show proceeds as a deliberate pastiche, dense with references to movies ranging from thirties screwballs to the work of David Lynch. (Jessica Lange plays a platinum-blonde monster mom whos like a cross between Patricia Arquette in The Act and Diane Ladd in Wild at Heart.) But the show has a special regard for Hollywood of the sixties and seventies, from the pill-popping swing of Valley of the Dolls to the bubblegum pop of Robert Redford in The Candidate and the chicken-salad sandwich from Five Easy Pieces. It knits these moods together to accommodate both paranoid thrills and grand pastel melodrama. The campiness and creepiness are joined by way of biting wit, such that the show reads like some kind of Hal Ashby telenovela. The Politician hits a tonefuriously angry, wistful beneath its bitternessthat is indebted to the disillusionment of the Nixon era, and updated to capture the disorientation of ours. The show doesnt quite do subtlety, or subtext, but nor do these times.

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Ryan Murphys The Politician Is a Funhouse-Mirror Reflection of the So-Called Meritocracy - The New Yorker