THE POLITICIAN

High school depicted as a hyper-real microcosm of society is not a new thing per se – Heathers featured an 80’s High School dealing with the spectre of teen suicide, Alexander Payne’s film Election had a young Reece Witherspoon as the determined Tracey Flick, running for Class President, seemingly at all costs, Wes Anderson’s film Rushmore also featured a similarly determined young protagonist with dreams of extreme ambition and Rian Johnson‘s Brick, messed about with the genre and created a heightened reality where Joseph Gordon Levitt’s protagonist attempts to solve a girl’s disappearance as if he’s a private eye in a Dashiell Hammett novel and the various cliques and gangs at his High School behave and talk like they’re trapped in the same novel.

 Which brings us to The Politician, Netflix made a pretty sweet $300 million deal with Glee and American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy to create content just for them – though technically this show is still under his old contract nevertheless he’s teamed up again with his collaborators from Glee : Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan. Falchuk is married to Gwyneth Paltrow, who also stars in and produces this new show that’s currently on Netflix. It bears a lot of similarities to Glee; another example of a hyper-real, exaggerated high school setting that’s populated with overly talented bright young things committing treacherous deeds and cracking one-liners like they’re trapped in Aaron Sorkin-land.