80 THENEWYORKER,M AY 9, 2022
ON TELEVISION
SECOND FIDDLE
“The First Lady,” on Showtime.
BY DOREEN S T. FÉLIX
ILLUSTRATION BY HAYDEN GOODMAN
“
T
he First Lady,” a ten-episode
miniseries on Showtime, des-
perately wants to convince you that it
is a chamber piece. Scarcely does the
camera go wide; it observes the East
Wing of the White House in medium
closeup, shrinking the domain of the
President’s spouse down to a misera-
ble tableau of dour furniture and even
more dour facial expressions. This is a
straightforward dramatic metaphor—
domestic interior as psychological
interior—and it might have been ef-
fective if the script demonstrated an
interest in its protagonists’ inner lives.
But it does not. The show won’t let El-
eanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford, and Mi-
chelle Obama, who are played by Gil-
lian Anderson, Michelle Pfeiffer, and
Viola Davis, respectively, be anything
but handsomely wounded victors.
The miniseries, cooked up by Aaron
Cooley, a first-time creator, and show-
run by Cathy Schulman, with all ten
episodes directed by Susanne Bier, is
an odd failure. It has a halting struc-
ture and a maudlin view of history
that make the show feel dated. Early
on, it dawns on you that the project is
very anti-Ryan Murphy. When mid-
dle-aged Hollywood goddesses are
gathered, our minds are thrust to that
auteur’s precinct, where, for better or
for worse, the mature performer is the
rebel muse and historical incident is
a putty plaything. In contrast, Coo-
ley’s cast has been sealed in an enclo-
sure, given no freedom to roam be-
yond the barrier of impersonation.
Style, too, has been banished. “The
First Lady” refuses any hint of irony,
satire, glamour, or scandal. I, too, can
tire of the showy po-mo aesthetics of
historical fictions these days, but that
doesn’t mean the answer is to abdicate
the insertion of perspective.
If “The First Lady” does have a per-
spective, it’s a mannered one, a fait ac-
compli: the idea that Americans have
an insatiable fascination with the par-
adox of the First Spouse, she who is
proximate to power though officially
endowed with none. As Eleanor Roo-
sevelt, dismayed to have not been given
an official position in her husband’s
Cabinet, laments, the First Lady po-
sition is not a job but, rather, her “cir-
cumstance.” The show makes First La-
dydom both generic and somehow
cosmic, a kind of condition passed on
from Administration to Administra-
tion, a mark placed on fifty-three Eves.
The creators have chosen their three
subjects carefully; a feminist gloss sticks
on them. The nature of these First La-
dies does not mesh with the expecta-
tions of the role. Eleanor is the vision-
ary, in the closet in more ways than
one; initially, she can evince her ge-
nius as a diplomat only through ven-
triloquism, feeding her husband his
best lines. Betty is exhausted with the
fakery of political life; an iconoclast,
and the last Republican wife before
the onslaught of the Reaganite far
right, she thumbs through “The Fem-
inine Mystique” and dances uninhib-
itedly to Harry Nilsson. Michelle, as
we know well, has a disdain for the
equivocation necessary to keep the po-
litical engine going. She’s also, as the
First Black First Lady, the unspoken
justification for the series: the ne plus
ultra of its gurgling optimism. Virtu-
ally every shred of dialogue is apho-
ristic. “First Ladies and their teams
are often the vanguards of social prog-
ress in this country,” Betty writes in a
letter to Michelle, at the beginning
of the Obama Administration. That
argument is specious at best, though
there’s nothing wrong with the show
The series, which refuses any hint of irony or glamour, is very anti-Ryan Murphy. allowing a fictionalized Betty to im-
