The 20 Best Political TV Shows

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.

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.