Previewing The First Lady

 

There was an old adage that the best way to win an acting Oscar was to play a real person.  Both Best Actor and Best Actress winners this year and seven of the ten nominees played real people.  21 Best Actor and Actress winners of the past two decades played real people.  That seems to be finally seeping into the Emmy’s with half of the lead acting nominees going to actors playing real people last year.  That trend seems to be continuing as there was an explosion of ripped from the headline shows this year with actors from The  Dropout, Dopesick, Under the Banner of Heaven, and The Survivor very likely to get nominations, with shows like Pam and Tommy, We Crashed, The Thing About Pam  in the hunt (sorry Inventing Anna, The Girl From Plainville, Impeachment, Super-Pumped, Joe vs. Carol, and way too many more to list).  Gold Derby gives the odds of 49 potential Best Actress in a Limited Series or Movie and 15 of the top 20 are actresses playing real peaple.  It should be noted both Gold Derby and Variety currently Margaret Qualley in Maid as the winner, one of the few original characters.

 

Complicating things is The First Lady with three very high profile leads; Gold Derby currently predicts nominations for former Emmy winners Viola Davis and Gillian Anderson (who won last year for portraying Margaret Thatcher) with Michelle Pfeiffer slight on the outside with the eight best odds.  Though Variety thinks those three leads will get complete shut out with the lone predicted nomination for the show going to O-T Fagbenle.  Of course a bunch of the shows mentioned so far have not even premiered yet, so take all this prognostication with a grain of salt.

 

While it is easy to predict nominations for actors who have already received the award, for me, if there was one of the three leads on The First Lady to receive a nomination, it should be Pfeiffer who plays the most interesting first lady in our country’s history, Betty Ford (though when she first came on screen, I thought she was playing Nancy Reagan).  Ford transcended the position, becoming synonymous with rehab after setting up the Betty Ford Clinic.  Even though I knew in the back of my head they were both part of the administration, I was surprised to see Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld pop up quite frequently on the show.  Susan Ford at one point jokes they are having an affair because they are almost always seen together.

 

Davis plays Michelle Obama despite being currently just two year younger than the former first lady and making her 12 years older than Obama when her husband elected and plays Michelle as far back as the early 00’s (this show jumps around a lot like Dopesick and even has the date scroll on the bottom every time they change dates).  The age difference is only exacerbated by the casting of Fagbenle as Barack who is fifteen years younger than Davis and five years younger than Barack when he was first sworn in.  It should also be noted that Pfeiffer is seven years older than Ford when Nixon resigned and nine years older than Aaron Eckhart who is also a little young, and let’s be honest, way too attractive to be playing Gerald Ford.

 

Gillian Anderson currently is an age Eleanor Roosevelt was during her term as first lady (there were no term limits back then so she did get to reign for twelve years) and also has an appropriately aged Kiefer Sutherland as her husband Franklin.  The Roosevelt’s are also a blank slate for most of modern television watchers.  Most people are at the very least familiar with the Betty Ford Clinic and the Obamas were in office in the era of too much information so anyone who is at least a teenage today probably has a vivid memory of them, but the Roosevelts lived in a much different time.  Most Americans at the time did not even know FDR was confined to a wheelchair.  There is one very prominent rumor about Eleanor that is brought on the show.

 

The show does delve in the past of these three ladies; episode three is completely devoted to the origin story of how they met their husbands.  Thankfully they did cast younger actresses to play the future first ladies in their twenties.  Kristine Froseth (Looking for Alaska, her co-star Charlie Plummer plays young FDR), Eliza Scanlen (Sharp Objects) plays young Eleanor, while Jayme Lawson (The Batman) plays young Michelle.  I wish these actresses got more than one episode (at least so far, I have not watched the final three episodes yet) but unfortunately in the television business, when you can get actresses the caliber of Davis, Anderson, and Pfeiffer, you are not going to sideline them for very long.  Dakota Fanning (The Alienist), Cailee Spaeny (Mare of Easttown), and Lexi Underwood (Little Fires Everywhere) play first daughters Susan Ford, Anna Roosevelt, Malia Obama respectively.  There were times, like when Susan's prom which took place at the White House gets referenced, that I wished this was a first kids show instead.

 

Each first lady gets a third of each episode as their stories intertwine all season.  But there are times where I wonder if the show would have been better off with the episodes being an anthology with a new one devoted to each new first lady instead spreading three stories out over the course of ten episodes.  Betty Ford is the only one of the three that has held my interest throughout the season while the Obama and Roosevelt stories drag at time.  Looking at potential future season it is hard to think of anyone else compelling enough to fill even a third of ten episodes.  I am sure producers are eager to get to Hilary Clinton even though the general public is fairly sick of the former and I am not sure if the need to see JFK’s head explode yet again.  Then Nancy Reagan was an actress and Melania Trump was a model.  But if there are more seasons, maybe they should go deeper into American history where less is known about the first ladies so they can take bigger liberties and will not feel like they need to rehash the Wikipedia pages.

 

The First Lady airs Sundays at 9:00 on Showtime.