October 22, 2024 12:07PM

The 20 Best Political TV Shows

A ranked list of the 20 best shows about American politics, including ‘SNL,’ ‘The Wire,’ ‘Parks and Recreation,’ and more longtime favorites

By ROLLING STONE

From fantasies like The West Wing and Scandal to satires like Veep to historical dramas like Mrs. America, the small screen has given us a wide range of shows that channel our political hopes, fears, disappointments, and outrages. If our real-life system of government has you on edge, these shows will help you find renewed reasons for optimism, or explain the failures of the present by examining the past, or let you imagine you’re a covert operative who can blow the whole damn thing up, or just make you laugh with a bunch of really obscene nicknames.

CONTRIBUTORS: Jon Dolan, Maria Fontoura, Elisabeth Garber-Paul, Andrew Perez, Alan Sepinwall, Kate Storey

From Rolling Stone US

If you’ve ever wondered what Aaron Sorkin’s take on YA might be, look no further than Jack & Bobby, a WB one-season wonder that aired from 2004 to 2005. Set in both its contemporary time and 2049, the show toggles between the family life of two teenage brothers — one of whom will grow up to be President of the United States — being raised by a single professor mom, and, in the future, the former president’s cabinet members doing talking-head interviews about his terms in office. The show’s heartwarming schlockiness (to be expected from the proto-CW network) is only amplified by the fact that it premiered two months before the Bush-Kerry presidential election, and it takes place on an unnamed Northeastern college campus where impassioned speeches about honor and dignity are a regular occurrence even for the two high-school-age boys living there. Come for the comfort of hearing people throw around the terms Democrat and Republican before the chasm between the two was insurmountable; stay for the bonus sighting of John Slattery playing Jessica Paré’s dad just a few years before they’d become Mad Men‘s Roger Sterling and Megan Draper. —Elisabeth Garber-Paul

Can a show be about politics if it barely features politicians? We would argue that The Americans qualifies, and not just because it’s one of the best dramas of the 21st century. In the Eighties, suburban Virginia couple Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth (Keri Russell) are actually deep-cover Soviet spies who are pretending to be married — and raising real, oblivious kids — so they can perform operations right in the shadow of Washington, D.C. What lands it on this list is that everything the couple does is driven by their ideological belief in the Soviet cause, and one of the most important moments of the series comes when true believer Elizabeth is shocked to hear Ronald Reagan describe her beloved homeland as “the Evil Empire.” —Alan Sepinwall

Created by Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau and directed by film legend Robert Altman, Tanner ’88 mixed the fictional story of obscure Michigan Congressman Jack Tanner (Michael Murphy) with appearances by actual 1988 presidential contenders like Jesse Jackson and Gary Hart. A show so far ahead of its time, even for its home network HBO, that a young Cynthia Nixon had a breakout role as Tanner’s college-age daughter. —A.S.

CBS’ Good Wife sequel series was originally intended as a victory lap of sorts for Christine Baranski’s Diane Lockhart, with the assumption that it would debut not long after Hillary Clinton became president. When the election shockingly went the other way, The Good Fight became the essential, deeply satirical, take on how insane it often felt to wake up each day in Donald Trump’s America and attempt to follow the rules in a society where rules no longer seemed to apply. —A.S.

Former Mad Men writer Dahvi Waller’s FX miniseries exploration of the 1970s battle over the Equal Rights Amendment managed to get inside a relatively obscure historical moment with nuance, detail, and empathy. The show is almost too rich with killer performances — Tracy Ullman as feminist author Betty Friedan, Margo Martindale as firebrand congresswoman Bella Abzug, and Cate Blanchett, who stars as grassroots right-wing backlash architect Phyllis Schlafly. The struggle between “libbers” and the housewife activists who opposed them is told less as a Manichean clash than as an overlapping drama of dialectically tangled worldviews — one of the rare times a pop-culture attempt to tell both sides of an issue actually leads to revelation rather than muddled pandering. Historian of conservatism Rick Perlstein called it “the only Hollywood product to produce a satisfying account of right-wing thought and politics.” —Jon Dolan

A little over a decade after Michael J. Fox became one of the biggest comedy stars on the planet for playing the arch-conservative son to a pair of shocked ex-hippie parents on the sitcom Family Ties, Michael J. Fox made a fictional career in politics with his return to television. As deputy New York mayor Mike Flaherty, Fox was focused less on a specific platform than he was on containing the eccentricity of Mayor Randall Winston (Barry Bostwick) and that of their co-workers. (The crackerjack ensemble included Richard Kind, Connie Britton, Alan Ruck, and, in later seasons — as Fox had to step back from acting due to his Parkinson’s — Heather Locklear and Charlie Sheen.) Other shows on this list dwelled more on policy, but Spin City showed you could use this world as the setting for a classic workplace comedy. —A.S.

In this 2018 Showtime mockumentary series, Sacha Baron Cohen goes undercover in numerous disguises to prank gun lobbyists, Dick Cheney, Trump supporters, Republican politicians like Roy Moore, garden-variety racists, and more. Cohen has the most success with an Israeli commando character, Erran Morad, to whom Republican politicians simply cannot say no. As Morad, he nabs conversations with Cheney and Moore, and ultimately forces the resignation of a Georgia state lawmaker who followed his training instructions with too much enthusiasm. Other pranks target conservatives for their anti-immigrant views and Islamophobia. While not every bit or character succeeds, the show’s hits provide some of the biggest laughs of any Trump-era programming. —Andrew Perez

Keri Russell’s second entry on this list finds her playing the sort of person her Americans character would have tried to strangle in a hotel pool: Kate Wyler, a career State Department operative who winds up improbably appointed as America’s ambassador to Great Britain right at a crisis moment for our allies on the other side of the Atlantic. What she doesn’t know at first is that the job is secretly an audition to replace the sitting vice president, who’s on the verge of having to resign when a scandal goes public. Part political thriller, part comedy of manners, part romantic farce (with Rufus Sewell as Kate’s more famous, and duplicitous, husband Hal), the Netflix series is not as deep as The Americans, but it’s an awful lot of fun. —A.S.

Like several entries here, this Showtime series is equal parts spy thriller and political drama, with bipolar CIA analyst Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) becoming obsessed with liberated prisoner of war Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), whom she’s convinced was turned by his terrorist captors. While they’re playing a cat-and-mouse game over multiple seasons, Brody somehow gets elected to Congress, and is on the verge of becoming the running mate of the presidential frontrunner, when things all go to hell. Even after Lewis left the show, there was always a strong political component, including Elizabeth Marvel joining the later seasons’ cast as a POTUS who at first tries to work closely with Carrie and Saul (Mandy Patinkin) before ultimately turning on the entire intelligence apparatus. —A.S.

When House of Cards premiered in 2013, it put Netflix on the map as not just a place to stream old movies but as a heavyweight of original TV programming. Kevin Spacey plays the ambitious and ruthless congressman and House Majority Whip Francis Underwood, who breaks the third wall, speaking his nefarious schemes directly to camera. As the series, which ran for six seasons, goes on, it’s Frank’s wife Claire, played by Robin Wright Penn, who steals the show, along with journalist Zoe Barnes, played by Kate Mara. Politics and political media become games won by power plays and plotting. In the show’s very first, shadowy scene, Frank says to the viewer, “There are two kinds of pain: the sort of pain that makes you strong, or useless pain, the sort of pain that’s only suffering. I have no patience for useless things,” while putting an injured dog out of its misery just out of the camera’s view. The show only gets darker and more twisted from there. —Kate Storey

Fox’s real-time action drama couldn’t keep Kiefer Sutherland’s superspy Jack Bauer running for every minute of every episode, so the action was frequently split between what he was up to as an agent of the fictional CTU (Counter Terrorist Unit), and what various presidential administrations were doing to either help or hinder him. The best and most iconic of all the 24 presidents was the very first: Dennis Haysbert as the unflappable David Palmer, whose radiating moral decency was equaled only by his utter ineptitude when it came to hiring underlings who wouldn’t betray him. —A.S.

Every David Simon drama is political in one or more ways, but this is the only one set almost entirely within the political sphere. Based on a real case from the late Eighties in Yonkers, New York, it follows a young mayor (Oscar Isaac) beset on all sides when the city is forced to follow through on a plan to build affordable housing. What should be impenetrably wonky material feels deeply human throughout, thanks to Isaac’s vulnerable performance and the smart ways that Simon and his collaborators show the impact this housing will have on the lives of the women fighting desperately to gain access to it. —A.S.

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The Good Wife begins with an image that had become so prevalent in real-life politics, it was almost a cliché: While disgraced Chicago prosecutor Peter Florrick (Chris Noth) speaks out on the scandal that’s derailing his once-promising career, his wife Alicia (Julianna Margulies) stands mutely by his side, trying to look supportive but obviously humiliated. From there, though, showrunners Robert and Michelle King take the familiar story in unexpected directions, from Alicia privately leaving Peter to restart the legal career she gave up to support his own ambitions, to various conflicts with Peter’s successors in the State’s Attorney’s office, to Peter mounting various comebacks, including a long-shot run for the presidency. Through it all, The Good Wife, which ran for seven seasons from 2009 to 2016, was as smart and well-assembled as any show on television. —A.S.

Based on David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning doorstop of a biography, this 2008 portrait of our nation’s second president spans his joining the First Continental Congress in the late 1700s through his post-presidential years. Produced by Tom Hanks, directed by future Oscar winner Tom Hooper, and featuring a stacked cast including Paul Giamatti as Adams and Laura Linney as his stalwart wife Abigail (plus fun sightings like Justin Theroux as John Hancock, a young Ebon Moss-Bachrach as John Quincy Adams, Andrew Scott as Adams’ son-in-law William Smith, and more), the seven-part HBO epic won 13 Emmys — the most ever for a miniseries. With nuanced storytelling and performances, the series stops short of hagiography, capturing Adams’ arrogance, stubbornness, and lack of politesse as much as his intellect and moral fortitude. It also presents the rest of the Founding Fathers as ordinary, flawed men arguing and compromising their way to a new form of government. A potent reminder of how it started versus how it’s going. —Maria Fontoura

As a sketch variety show, SNL is an outlier on this list, but there’s no question it’s one of the most political programs in history. With a long tradition of satirizing American political life, the show has parodied every U.S. president and major candidate since it debuted in 1975. And when the impersonation really strikes a nerve — from Chevy Chase playing Gerald Ford as a clumsy idiot to Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin chirping, “I can see Russia from my house!” — it has at times altered how the public views the very people it’s skewering. —A.S.

Scandal is a show about politics as much as General Hospital is a show about the medical profession. But it is set — salaciously so — in and around the Oval, and from the moment D.C. fixer Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) and her misfit team of “gladiators” get to work in the pilot, it braids plenty of campaign grudges, backroom intrigue, and international crises into its central story of a torrid love affair between Pope and the President of the United States (Tony Goldwyn). The blockbuster Shonda Rhimes series ran from April 2012 to April 2018, and its early episodes have an almost shockingly pre-#MeToo feel. Yet there is also something soothing about revisiting it today: It might be the only universe where the wild conspiracy theories and the capacity of government officials to do evil deeds are worse than reality. —M.F.

In the first episode of this classic mockumentary, Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) says of her job as deputy parks and recreation director of the fictional Indiana city of Pawnee, “What I hear when I’m being yelled at is people caring loudly at me.” Over the course of seven seasons, Parks and Rec follows Leslie’s remarkable rise in political power, from ignored small-town civil servant all the way to the national stage. (Joe Biden, vice president during the show’s run, even has multiple cameos in the final seasons.) But no matter what office Leslie is seeking, or serving, the comedy never loses sight of that early quote, nor the way that Leslie’s superhuman optimism is forever at odds with the selfishness, cynicism, and outright stupidity of the constituents whose lives she is working so doggedly to improve. —A.S.

Maybe the only reason The Wire isn’t our number one pick is that, while it was incredible in how it dramatized modern politics, it was also incredible at how it dramatized everything about life in urban America at the turn of the century. In fact, it wasn’t even until the third season of David Simon an Ed Burns’ HBO drama that we even began to spend time in Baltimore’s City Hall, where councilman Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen) ponders the uphill climb of running for mayor as a white candidate in a predominantly Black city. From that point on, The Wire deftly and devastatingly showed how political good fortune can often have little to nothing to do with the merits of a candidate, how quickly idealism can turn into opportunism, and how hard it is to effect meaningful change in a system that from most angles looks fundamentally broken. —A.S.

If this list included shows about countries outside of America, Armando Iannucci’s satire of the British government, The Thick of It, would rank very high. Luckily, after ruthlessly mocking his own government, Iannucci came across the pond to do the same to ours with Veep. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in an all-timer comedic performance, plays Vice President Selina Mayer, who has what’s theoretically the second-most powerful job in the world, but in practice has no power, no influence, and no opportunity except to repeatedly make a fool of herself thanks to her own shortcomings and those of her staffers. Veep takes the position that everyone who goes into politics is at best self-interested and amoral, and at worst a dangerous idiot. This gambit could play as relentlessly bleak, but the cast and the writing are so sharp that watching Selina and her cohort fail at everything they try becomes addictive, and hilarious. —A.S.

There have been more realistic shows about American politics than this Aaron Sorkin-created drama about the administration of Martin Sheen’s Josiah Bartlet. But Sorkin’s conception of a world where well-meaning idealists get things done simply by being smart and caring deeply is an intoxicating family, and one buttressed by the fiery oratory of Sheen and the spectacular work of an ensemble that won many, many Emmys for Allison Janney, John Spencer, Richard Schiff, and others. Spend more than a few minutes following a walk-and-talk on the way to the Oval Office, and you, too, will want to declare that you serve at the pleasure of the president. —A.S.

The 20 Best Political TV Shows

A ranked list of the 20 best shows about American politics, including ‘SNL,’ ‘The Wire,’ ‘Parks and Recreation,’ and more longtime favorites

‘Jack & Bobby’

‘The Americans’

‘Tanner ’88’

‘The Good Fight’

‘Mrs. America’

‘Spin City’

‘Who Is America?’

‘The Diplomat’

‘Homeland’

‘House of Cards’

’24’

‘Show Me a Hero’

‘The Good Wife’

‘John Adams’

‘Saturday Night Live’

‘Scandal’

‘Parks and Recreation’

‘The Wire’

‘Veep’

‘The West Wing’

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