Hail to the Chief (all five of them on TV)
Hail to the Chief. And the Chief. And the Chief ...
On television, the presidency is a growth industry, as five very different chief executives — three men and two women — play significant roles this season on a broad range of shows: ABC's Scandal, CBS' Madam Secretary, HBO's Veep, Netflix's House of Cards and NBC's Katherine Heigl drama, State of Affairs.
"I think the idea of how power is acquired and then wielded is a source of endless fascination for the public," says Keith Carradine, who plays President Conrad Dalton on Secretary (Sundays, 8 p.m. ET/PT). "All the American public gets, for the most part, is a surface (view). Most people are perceptive enough to realize there's more here than meets the eye. What's going on behind the scenes? I think that's what a lot of these shows are attempting to address."
The stature of the office heightens the drama, says Tony Goldwyn, who plays President Fitzgerald Grant on Scandal (Thursdays, 9 p.m. ET/PT). "In Washington, the stakes are very, very high. Whether it's All the President's Men or Scandal or Veep, it's a supercharged kind of world."
Almost all the series are thriving — four will return, although Affairs will likely soon be out of office — with each finding its own path to success. Two of the presidents, Cards' Francis Underwood (Kevin Spacey) and Veep's Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), only recently ascended to the Oval Office, but each was firmly entrenched in Beltway politics, as are the senators in Amazon's congressional comedy, Alpha House.
Cards (Season 3 streaming on Netflix) takes a dark view of power and ambition, while Scandal brings soapy melodrama, viewing the most powerful man in the world through the prism of his love affair with central character Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington). Veep (Sunday, 10:30 p.m. ET/PT), the lone presidential comedy in this group, savages vanity and incompetence, which exist at every level but are heightened on the world stage. Secretary comes closest to the good-government sincerity of TV's biggest presidential hit, NBC's The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin's drama that starred Martin Sheen and ran from 1999-2006.
Although some of the shows take wild departures from real life – Cards' Underwood and Scandal's Grant have both committed murder – the less-than-complimentary take on those in power reflects a contemporary attitude.
Until the early 1970s, most people didn't believe that presidents would lie, but the public has come to see that the chief executive can be flawed, says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
Although a murderous president is highly implausible, "The fact that people don't respond to these plots by saying, 'That's an institution that should be treated separately,' means that the presidency is now a different creature than it was 40 years ago," says Jamieson, co-author of Presidents Creating the Presidency. "Hollywood is telling us that our attitudes have changed."
Actors who play presidents are struck by that supreme authority, even if it's only make-believe.
"It really surprised me. You walk into the room and everyone stands up. People defer to you. You are automatically endowed with this authority and power that comes with putting the 'P' word in front of your name," says Goldwyn, who has had the "surreal" experience of playing a TV president and meeting with the real one in the White House.
Programs generally steer clear of the kind of partisan politics that risk driving away half the audience. Underwood is a Democrat and Grant is a Republican, but neither dwells on the actual parties' platforms. Grant's position on social issues would put him far to the left of real-life Republican politics. Veep and Secretary don't even reveal the president's political party.
TV series have been ahead of the real electorate in expanding the presidency beyond an exclusive club for white men. In 2001, seven years before Barack Obama was elected, 24 featured an African-American president, David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert).
And while the real-life Oval Office has been a boys' club, women have held the land's highest office on shows such as Veep, State of Affairs, Commander in Chief and 24. Such depictions can affect attitudes, says Thomas Hollihan, a professor who focuses on political communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.
"I think there's a lot of historical experience that suggests media programs prepare people for the cultural shifts that are going to occur in their lifetime. Entertainment (can) move culture as well as reflect culture," he says. Hillary Clinton "is clearly the Democratic front-runner. We'll see if this has been a precursor to the election of the first female."