Alpha House

Although topicality trips up some of the jokes, others are spot-on.

Political comedies tend to work best when they're absurdist (like Duck Soup, or HBO's Veep) or much, much subtler (the gold standard being Tanner '88, a collaboration between Trudeau and Robert Altman). Alpha House falls somewhere in the middle and gets stranded there, though the company is so likable that it's a limbo you may not mind being stranded in.

Another of those amusing but not necessarily laugh-out-loud funny sitcoms that are so popular on premium cable channels.

The show is so tight--maybe too tight--that it starts to choke on its own power-tie premise in the first three episodes.

Alpha House hits a few notes of inspired satire--like the bowl of American flag lapel pins the senators keep on the kitchen counter--but Trudeau’s been more biting and much funnier elsewhere, past TV efforts like Tanner ’88 and the malaise-infected Doonesbury Special included.