Nancy: It's The Takeaway. I'm Nancy Solomon in for Tanzina. Now we shift our focus from real-life political drama to the fictional kind. Political TV shows and movies have seen unwavering popularity over the decades. We wanted to know about your favorite political shows, movies, and characters, and here's what you told us.

Robin: Hi, this is Robin from Philadelphia. My most recent favorite political drama is Borgen, which is about a woman named Birgitte Nyborg who becomes the first female Prime Minister of Denmark. In addition to really enjoying the characters who felt to me much more real and less Hollywoody than a lot of characters on American shows, I also gained a better understanding of how a parliamentary system works and what goes on behind the scenes between the media, politicians, and what they referred to as their spin doctors.

Speaker 1: I always liked Air Force One with Harrison Ford as the president "Get off my plane."

Speaker 2: I think the movie Dave offered an interesting commentary on fiscal responsibility. The time that his accounting friend came to the White House and went through the budget is iconic on how they found so much governmental waste.

Speaker 3: The Best Man with Henry Fonda, who's always fantastic, Manchurian Candidate, Angela Lansbury is so brilliantly evil. Dick with Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams is so funny.

Nancy: Some people prefer comedies that parody our lawmakers, but personally, I'm a big fan of the political thriller. I think what I love best is the mix of public policy, politics, and good old action. No matter how much high stakes tension there is going on in the actual Washington DC or California, for that matter, there's something endlessly entertaining about the best of these shows and through them, we get a peek behind the Capitol Walls with varying degrees of accuracy. Joining me now to talk about what the best of these shows have to offer is Dr. Lilly Goren, professor of political science and global studies at Carroll University and co-author of Mad Men in Politics. Lilly, Great to have you here.

Lilly: Thanks for having me on today, Nancy.

Nancy: What do you think makes a good political thriller?

Lilly: Well, a lot of it is the drama, obviously, so whatever the narrative arc of the show or the movie is. Some of the ones mentioned by your listeners, including things like Borgen or The Manchurian Candidate, are among my favorites. Also the depth of the characters involved and how they are interacting with politics as well.

Nancy: Do you think that most successful political television shows tend to mirror the political reality of the moment or are they usually things like The West Wing that provide a more idealistic and hopeful version of our politics.

Lilly: They usually go in either direction of something like The West Wing or Madam Secretary, which are idealistic and to some degree, fantastic, or they go in the other direction, like say House of Cards or Scandal where there's a lot of murder and duplicity and secret things going on in the halls of power. Neither of them are really based on reality, but they're fun to watch and, of course, they have great actors and actresses and really interesting writers who are threading the plot lines.

Nancy: I'm surprised that there aren't more shows like the House of Cards. There's obviously a huge appetite for detective stories, police procedurals, mysteries like that, and that The House of Cards is a perfect blend of that, but we just haven't seen that many of them, right?

Lilly: Yes, and again, you have shows that do take this up and something like The Wire is another show that's actually quite political, but it's not national. It's in Baltimore and it's at a lower level. It's about local politics. You do have different kinds of approaches to thinking about the insanity of something like House of Cards, but you may see it in some different venues.

Nancy: I have loved access to international TV that streaming has brought us and some of my favorite shows have been the Norwegian show called Occupied, which is a full-on political thriller, the Israeli show Prisoners of War which was behind that led to the American Homeland series, and I think my all-time favorite was The Bureau, which is a French spy agency show, but had a very geopolitical focus plot. Have you seen much international TV? What shows you liking?

Lilly: I have, and a number of the ones that you are talking about like The Bureau are among some of my favorites and particularly Borgen which, the first time I saw it, I never wanted to do anything else but watch Borgen. Again, you can contrast that to a show that was made more than a decade or two decades ago in the United States, by Geena Davis, Commander in Chief, that was on for one season, also about a woman as president of the United States, and all of the conflicts that she dealt with at home and in the office and so forth, that were centering around her gender.

In Borgen, you see so much of the same thing, but you also see it in a parliamentary system, and all of the differences that that kind of a system in a coalition government has. I think you're right. There are quite a few international shows that also show us a lot of political thrillers, like Occupied, which was, again, a fascinating show.

Nancy: Are there any particular shows that really captured the Trump era in Washington?

Lilly: Well, I've been asked this question before, and the television show that is about to debut its fourth season, the Handmaid's Tale, was actually greenlit or put into production before Trump was elected president, but it debuted just after he became president. There was a lot of discussion about how it seemed to be capturing the Zeitgeist of the Trump years in terms of having women lose autonomy or agency over themselves and their bodies, and some of the ways that Mr. Trump was misogynistic in some of his commentary about women.

I don't think that the Handmaid's Tale necessarily captures the Trump years per se, but television also has a lag time because things often have to go into production a year or two beforehand, and with COVID, it's been very difficult to do the filming and produce the shows because of the limits on the capacity to do that safely. I think we may also have a lag in terms of shows that reflect what people may have been feeling during the Trump administration.

Nancy: Maybe it'll take a couple years, but we'll start to see something a little less dark and a little more optimistic.

Lilly: We may. There's always hope. Of course, we had shows like Scandal that tapered off during this period as well, which were dark as well.

Nancy: Dr. Lilly Goren is a professor of political science and global studies at Carroll University. Lilly, thanks so much.

Lilly: My pleasure. Thanks for having me on today.

[00:08:16] [END OF AUDIO]

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