After becoming a commercial nonentity during the mid-'90s, Steven Soderbergh came roaring back into the Hollywood mainstream with an Academy Award and a trio of massive critical and commercial hits: Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and Ocean's Eleven. Giddy with success and power, Soderbergh then irascibly reverted to his experimental Schizopolis mold with Full Frontal, Solaris, and HBO's K Street, a cutting-edge drama about a political public-relations firm, designed to be revolutionary in content, form, and process. Largely improvised—and shot, edited, and rushed onto the air the same breathless week—the show audaciously attempted to create a program that plugged into the cultural and political zeitgeist while remaining as timely as a CNN news scrawl.
If that weren't ambitious enough, the show blurs the lines separating fact from fiction. Real-life superstar spin-doctors Mary Matalin and James Carville ostensibly play themselves, but the show isn't a documentary: Actual politicians, playing themselves, interact not only with Matalin and Carville, but also with cast members Mary McCormack, John Slattery, and standout Roger Guenveur Smith (whose silky delivery makes every line sound like a secret whispered in a lover's ear), all of whom play fictional characters working on real-life issues. So what is K Street, ultimately? A soap opera for policy wonks? A public-affairs show for soap-opera fans? A documentary? An exposé of Washington wheeling and dealing? It's a little of each, and not wholly any. Soderbergh, who directs and films under his Peter Andrews pseudonym, aims for a jittery, hyper-real quality, trying to capture the voyeuristic sense that the audience is watching a raw assemblage of stolen glances and overheard conversations. Like the paranoid '70s conspiracy thrillers it emulates, K Street sometimes feels like it's being filmed by a caffeinated CIA spook doing surveillance on the main characters.
At times, that approach pays off, giving the show a nervous, unpredictable energy unlike anything else on TV. But more often, K Street seems unsure of what it wants to do and how it intends to do it. There's a reason comedy and satire are more conducive to improvisation than drama: In comedy, the visceral response of laughter supercedes all else, while drama has a much vaguer, less immediate, more abstract set of demands. This helps explain why K Street's character and dramatic arcs often feel shapeless and half-formed. The show's investment in documenting the mechanics of the political process can be fascinating and revelatory, as in an early episode in which Carville helps coach Howard Dean for a debate, but the show too often devolves into windy speechifying about arcane issues which, in spite of everyone's best intentions, remain doggedly abstract. Nevertheless, it's a shame that K Street only lasted one season. If it had been given more time to work out the kinks and define its sensibility, it could have become the groundbreaking evolutionary leap its creators intended, instead of a tantalizing taste of what could have been.