In the very first scene of Showtime’s The First Lady, artist Amy Sherald (Tiffany Denise Hobbs) explains to Michelle Obama (Viola Davis), while working on that iconic portrait, exactly why she wanted to paint her, and not her POTUS husband Barack Obama (O-T Fagbenle).
“Well, the thing is, the president, even a Black president, is the institution,” Amy explains. “I don’t want to just paint the official. I am interested in the real.”
The First Lady
I suppose you could argue that it represents some modest form of progress that The First Lady digs beyond the “official” position that’s so far only been held by men, and focuses on the work their wives have always done behind the scenes — as confidantes and advisors to their husbands, as symbols for the public, as activists in their own right. But insipid hagiography does not automatically become deeper or smarter because women are at the center, and for all its glossy sheen and good intentions, The First Lady has little to offer that feels truly, meaningfully “real.”
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Created by Aaron Cooley, with Cathy Schulman serving as showrunner, the series weaves together the personal lives, professional accomplishments and lingering legacies of three first ladies. In the first half of the 20th century, Eleanor Roosevelt (Gillian Anderson) helps Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Kiefer Sutherland) navigate life-changing illness, the Great Depression and the Second World War while championing women’s rights and human rights.
A few decades later, Betty Ford (Michelle Pfeiffer), wife of Gerald Ford (Aaron Eckhart), makes a splash with her outspokenness about her health struggles and her support for feminist causes.
And bringing the series into the 21st century is Michelle, who dedicates herself to issues like healthcare alongside Barack as they face the unique challenges of life as America’s first Black first family.
Each of the ten hour-long episodes directed by Susanne Bier skip back and forth in time to braid their three disparate arcs together, with captions and snippets of archival footage to situate us in time and place. Occasionally, the approach makes for touching juxtapositions — like when members of the Obama family huddle around a laptop to enjoy Marian Anderson’s 1939 National Mall performance, which we’ve just watched Eleanor help organize after the singer was refused by the segregated Constitution Hall. The moment does as much as anything else in the show to emphasize the lasting impact one first lady’s principled stand can have.
More often, however, the structure only forces all three stories into stiff, familiar molds. Recent dramas like The Crown or Mrs. America have succeeded in making history feel immediate again by reframing past events through a more intimate or empathetic lens, or with a fresh sense of style or perspective. In contrast, The First Lady dutifully runs through its checklist of important facts like there’s going to be a multiple choice quiz later, with little sense of the humanity underlying them.
In part, this seems to be a function of its limited time. Even if the show sees fit to mention that, say, Eleanor was self-conscious about her “plain” appearance as a teenager (played by Eliza Scanlen), it doesn’t have room to delve into how exactly that ties into her early romance with Franklin (Charlie Plummer) beyond a passing comment or two — not when it has to hop away to detail the Fords’ and Obamas’ courtships within the same episode, to say nothing of all the other major life events it has to cover in subsequent ones.
But this time crunch is not helped by scripts that rarely show when they can just tell. Complex relationships that should have been laid out over episodes, like Eleanor’s apparent indifference toward her daughter Anna (Cailee Spaeny), are dispensed with in brief, blunt confrontations. Cultural context is established by having Betty wave around a copy of The Feminine Mystique, without having her actually discuss the book in any substantial way. Characters are constantly explaining things to each other that they should already know, as when Malia Obama (Lexi Underwood) reminds her dad that his words (or silence) about gay marriage carries weight.
A few of the performances are strong enough to transcend these clunky choices. Pfeiffer carries herself with the gracefulness of a dancer — which, as we see in multiple flashbacks to her younger self (Kristine Froseth), is exactly what Ford was once — and navigates easily between Betty’s dazzling charm, her substance-fueled fuzziness and her occasional fits of panic and rage. In other timelines, Jayme Lawson, playing a young Michelle Obama, is a sweet, steady presence, especially in scenes with the character’s parents (Regina Taylor and Michael Potts); and Lily Rabe brings a much-needed depth of feeling as Eleanor’s paramour, journalist Lorena Hickock.
But too many of the cast fall back on physical mimicry rather than emotional embodiment, perhaps because, faced with such blandly written characters, the actors don’t have much else to go on. At some point, it becomes more distracting to see how hard Davis is working to move her mouth like Obama’s than it probably would have been to simply accept that Michelle Obama looks like Viola Davis in this universe. Likewise, Fagbenle and Sutherland’s vocal impressions of Barack Obama and FDR, respectively, never stop feeling like just that — impressions.
That superficiality feels part and parcel with the series as a whole. In its eagerness to serve up uncomplicated portraits of heroism, The First Lady airbrushes out any flaws or follies that might make its characters seem actually human, and averts is eyes from any real controversy. The characters might frequently find themselves at odds in their own lives — with the backwards thinking of whatever era they’re living through, with the sexist male political advisors who’d prefer they keep their mouths shut, with husbands whose convictions sometimes waver in the face of political strategy — but they’re never presented in conflict with each other, much less with any ideas that an ostensibly feminist-friendly viewer in 2022 might find truly provocative. (Meanwhile, first ladies who don’t fit neatly into the show’s female-empowerment theme go more or less ignored, though it does allow Betty the satisfaction of calling Nancy Reagan a “hypocrite” while watching her on TV.)
In a letter to Michelle, welcoming her into the long lineage of first ladies, Betty explicitly acknowledges that the role is a political one: “First ladies and their teams are often the vanguards of social progress in this country,” she notes. It’s the major commonality tying all three protagonists together across time, and to the extent that they’ve been successful at pushing the country toward greater equality or enlightenment, they’re certainly worth celebrating. But the series itself isn’t at the vanguard of anything. It’s a throwback to the kind of self-satisfied myth-making that’s surrounded this country’s leaders from time immemorial.
