Have I ever been less interested in watching a new show?
Commander in Chief delivers Geena Davis as Mackenzie Allen, America’s first female president. Even as novel as the show’s premise is (which isn’t as novel as its marketers probably hoped it would be), Commander displays a remarkable lack of imagination: The travails of the first woman in the Oval Office are exactly what you would guess they would be. But Commander in Chief is interesting; interesting as a liberal fantasy (the New York Times’s description, not mine). An almost Freudian bomb is buried beneath its cliché shots of D.C. monuments lit up at night: Deep down, liberals like the ones who wrote Commander harbor a repressed desire to be like George W. Bush.
Commander is an archetypal liberal tale: A hero is challenged by blind prejudice but rises to show us that when we embrace equality and diversity, it all works out.
Every time a character remarks how she would be the first female president, another shoots back “and the first independent.” In the glorious future, with the issues so perfectly framed, “Democrat” and “liberal” have withered away, and everyone presumably knows that their choice is between upright, sincere independents like Allen and icy, extremist Republicans. Ah, to dream.
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