Critic Reviews

Ben Platt (Broadway’s “Dear Evan Hansen”) goes all Tracy Flick in this comedy. ... This is one of the year’s best.

It’s another dazzling Murphy triumph. It has his trademark hurricane of a narrative that sweeps you up and deposits you breathless and agape somewhere else entirely an hour later. He has garnered a set of blistering performances from his actors.

Although the relentless superficiality of the characters gets tiring, it allows you to keep laughing as they double cross and second guess each other at a turbocharged pace. There’s fun to be had at the expense of the premise of the school as a microcosm of American society.

A rollicking meditation on fakes, frauds, and phonies, where anything from a spouse to a case of cancer can turn out to be counterfeit—and probably will.

The Politician provides plenty of laughs and on-target jabs at our current political moment — but it’s the battered yet still-beating heart found in Platt’s performance that ultimately has us pulling the lever for this one.

Following Payton’s own journey of self-discovery, by the end of the season, “The Politician” becomes far more nuanced and complex than its initial few episodes suggest.

“The Politician” hits a tone—furiously angry, wistful beneath its bitterness—that is indebted to the disillusionment of the Nixon era, and updated to capture the disorientation of ours. The show doesn’t quite do subtlety, or subtext, but nor do these times.

Even when The Politician is flailing all over the place, its heart is tapped into the pain of living in a world full of rich white people and forcing down everything that makes you a little bit different. Like Murphy’s best shows, The Politician is about how sad being happy can be.

After his revisionist history Hollywood was met with a lukewarm reception, it’s good to see Ryan Murphy back at what he does best, garish colours, obnoxious characters, power suits and all.

Murphy productions are never boring, and this one bursts with frothy twists and amusing set pieces. ... Yet it’s Payton who makes the show more than just fun.